Ken Adelman: A Rat Abandons a Ship of Fools

Posted on Monday, November 20, 2006. By Ken Silverstein.

“Embittered Insiders Turn Against Bush,” was the headline of a front-page Washington Post story yesterday that detailed how former Iraq hawks have broken with the Bush Administration over the war. Exhibit A was Ken Adelman, a onetime Reagan Administration official and “onetime member of the Iraq war brain trust,” who has fallen out with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, and who told the Post that “the President is ultimately responsible” for the “debacle” in Iraq.

Adelman's hypocrisy is stunning. In 2002 it was he who famously predicted that American forces would enjoy “a cakewalk” in Iraq, and during the run-up to the invasion he derided war critics for their stupidity and naiveté. “There's always the chicken littles, running around and saying 'oh my God, it's terrible,'” he said on Hardball, six days before the war began, when asked about the possibility that things might not go as smoothly as he and his fellow-hawks had predicted.

The following month, he was gloating to the New York Times that his “cakewalk” prediction had been remarkably prescient. Adelman, according to the story, “scorned recent complaints by retired generals and military analysts that the Pentagon had deployed too few troops” to Iraq. “I always thought that was ridiculous,” Adelman told the newspaper. “It turned out they were factually wrong. I never understood what having three times as many troops would have done.”
But what's most astonishing about Adelman's current criticism of the Bush Administration is that he argued for a “stay the course” approach long after it became clear that the war was a burgeoning disaster. He paid no mind to the idea that Iraqis were growing uneasy with the American presence, and said that although the administration was doing its best, more needed to be done in terms of generating employment and economic opportunities. “There were possibilities in the beginning, but they were all [floundering] for some reason or other,” he told MSNBC in June of 2003.

Here's a reason: Adelman and other war proponents were dead wrong when they envisioned a post-war scenario in which Iraqis greeted American troops with flowers and Iraq became a model democracy.

The following month, back on Hardball, Adelman—by now a regular on the talk show circuit—blandly stated that there was absolutely no need to put more U.S. troops on the ground, despite the complete failure of American forces to establish any type of order. “I would not go reinforce the troops,” he stated confidently. “I would accelerate the Iraqization of security.”
In September, during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Adelman once again went after war critics. “The war has been over, just, what is it, five months or something like that? And it takes a long time to rebuild a country,” he said. “The big problem has been not the war [in] Iraq, but the big problem has been twenty years of Saddam Hussein . . . They ran down everything about that country, so that we have to have time.” He derided the comments of another guest, Jessica Stern, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, who said that the war was creating anger in the Arab world and generating future jihadists. “We've heard the same thing before we went into Iraq . . . that the Arab street was going to rise up,” said Adelman. He went on to claim that the polls Stern cited were probably unreliable.

By April of 2004, it was no longer possible for Adelman to deny the unraveling situation in Iraq, but nothing, he argued, was fundamentally wrong with the Bush Administration's strategy. In an op-ed that month in USA Today (“Don't change course now”), he acknowledged a few minor problems with the hawks' prewar statements. “Those of us who championed Iraq's liberation were way too sanguine,” he wrote. “We were wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. Wrong about Iraqis cooperating fully after Saddam Hussein was deposed. And probably wrong about close ties between Saddam's henchmen and Al Qaeda's fanatics.”
But they were right about everything else, he maintained, and he added that “panicky cries for a change of course must be rejected. . . . Calling for a new U.S. approach, for its own sake, risks undermining this battle.” Indeed, said Adelman, “Iraqis can't defeat us. Only USA Today editorials and similar worrywarts can defeat us.”

Now, after all this, Adelman would have us believe that he has absolutely no responsibility for the Iraq disaster? His breaking point on Iraq, he told the Post, was Bush's decision to award Medals of Freedom to Paul Bremer, General Tommy Franks, and George Tenet. “The three individuals who got the highest civilian medals the President can give were responsible for a lot of the debacle that was Iraq.” Adelman sounds jealous, not righteous. It's too bad there’s no medal for being a whining, war-promoting hypocrite.

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Tomorrow, November 21 at 10PM, many PBS stations will show Washington Babylon author Ken Silverstein as part of the program Independent Lens: Democracy on Deadline. Washington, D.C. viewers can watch the program on December 2nd.

http://harpers.org/sb-ken-adelman-1164050030.html