Vanity Fair talks to the neocons:
[Richard] 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.’….
Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured “Prince of Darkness” is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.
I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.
Well, it’s nice to see them stabbing Bush in the back, anyhow. The problem with their story is that it isn’t presidential incompetence that ruined anything, it’s that the democracy project was a hopelessly bad idea in the first place.