In a press release yesterday, Vanity Fair trumpeted a forthcoming article featuring some of the country's most prominent neoconservatives speaking out about what they see as the failures in their pet project, the Iraq war. The article features neocons like Kenneth Adelman, Elliot Cohen, David Frum and Richard Perle, who told the magazine that if he could do it all over again 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,'" Perle said. It's just one of several shocking and revealing quotes, like this one from Michael Ledeen:
"Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."
But now Frum has hit back at Vanity Fair's story. In a piece published by the National Review and the Huffington Post, not to mention heralded in a press release we received today from the Republican National Committee, Frum writes that "Vanity Fair transformed a Washington debate over 'how to correct course and win the war' to advance obsessions all their own ... The editors and publicists at Vanity Fair have repackaged truths that a war-fighting country needs to hear into lies intended to achieve a shabby partisan purpose."
Frum says he has no remorse about the war; his "most fundamental views on the war," he says, "remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous."
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