Neocons setting up Rumsfeld as Iraq fall guy

MercuryNews.com | 12/22/2004: "Last year, Midge Decter published a mash note titled ``Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait.'' The University of Houston's James D. Fairbanks began his review thus: ``Neoconservative writer Midge Decter sets out to explain just what it is about Donald Rumsfeld that has well-educated, sophisticated women swooning over him.

Ever since he signed on with their Committee on the Present Danger in the 1980s, Rumsfeld had been a hero to neocons. In 1998, he signed Kristol's open letter to Clinton calling for war on Iraq, three years before Sept. 11. Named defense secretary, Rumsfeld brought in neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith as his No. 2 and No. 3, and let them fill the building with friends from Neocon Central, the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Perle was given the chair of the Defense Policy Review Board, which was turned into a neocon nest at the Pentagon. In the hours after Sept. 11, Rumsfeld made the case to Bush for immediate war on Iraq. When Baghdad fell in three weeks, he was the toast of the cakewalk crowd and the centerfold of Midge and the neocon girls.

Now many are snaking on him. What is going on? Simple.

Rumsfeld is being set up to take the fall for what could become a debacle in Iraq. As the plotters, planners and propagandists of this war, the neocons know that if Iraq goes the way of Vietnam, there will be a search conducted for those who misled us and, yes, lied us into war, and why they did it. Rumsfeld has become designated scapegoat.

President Bush had best recognize what Kristol is telling him. The neocon agenda means escalation: enlarging the Army, more U.S. troops in Iraq, widening the war to Syria and Iran, and indefinite occupation of the Middle East, as we forcibly alter the mindset of the Islamic world to embrace democracy and Israel.

If that entails endless expenditures of Americans tax dollars and the blood of U.S. soldiers, the neocons are more than willing to make the sacrifice. But if Bush himself fails to deliver, rely upon it. He, too, will get the Rumsfeld treatment from this crowd, parasitical and opportunistic as it is, as it seeks another host to ride, perhaps John McCain."

PATRICK J. BUCHANAN is a syndicated columnist.