neocons pile on

see update below

They’re spinning in the wake of the earlier-than-agreed-upon release of the juicy tidbits, but Messrs. Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and Michael Rubin have all told journalist David Rose about their deep displeasure with Iraq.

These gentlemen were, of course, part of the dread “neocon cabal” that was charged with brainwashing Bush into toppling Saddam because “the road to Jerusalem is through Baghdad” (a charge that is still being promulgated by Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, of the “Israel Lobby” fame).

Now, in a preview of the full Vanity Fair article, which will appear in mid-December:

Perle says, “The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn’t get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don’t think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty.”

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: “I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.’ … I don’t say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.”

They’ve had a soft landing so far. All things considered, Maureen Dowd [$$] went easy on the neocons in yesterday’s column.

Scaling new heights in the annals of Now They Tell Us, [Perle and Adelman] blame the “dysfunctional” Bush team for the “disaster” in Iraq and say that if they had known then what we all know now (and what some of us knew then), they never would have pushed to invade Iraq.

Certainly, this isn’t the last we’ve heard about the Self-Criticisms to End All Self-Criticisms.

update: The furious counterspin to Vanity Fair’s framing this as a “neocons pile on Bush” can be found here, at National Review Online.