Ignore The NeoCons!

A few weeks ago, we urged Bush to ignore the most recent advice--for a troop "surge"--offered by the neocons who got him into the Iraq mess in the first place. "Fool me once, shame on you, fool, fool me . . . you shouldn't get fooled again," as Bush would say.

We're shocked that Bush has ignored our advice. Once again, he's preparing to go down the neocon road, adopting a watered-down version of a plan peddled by Frederick Kagan, a neocon at the American Enterprise Institute, to "surge" troops into Baghdad as a means to quell sectarian violence.

Kagan's plan, titled "Blueprint for Victory," has been peddled all over Washington. Kagan, however, calls for 30-35,000 more troops, not the 20,000 Bush plans to call on. (This will, of course, let Kagan and other neocons off the hook when the new surge, inevitably, fails.)

The neocons have been so wrong on Iraq at every step of the way that it's a wonder they haven't been rounded up by a mob and deported to deepest darkest Africa. They've been about as competent as Mussolini's fascists. Why would anyone, much less the President of the United States, listen to a single more word they have to say?

While we could go on at some length about the perfidy of the neocons, someone else has done it for us, quite well. In "Selective Amnesia: The Pundits Who Sold The Iraq War Change Their Tune and Bury Their Records," Glenn Greenwald, writing in, of all places, the American Conservative, provides us with some useful reminders of just how shady this crowd really is.

Perhaps George Bush would like to give it a read before he commits our nation to an even more disastrous path and sends more young American men and women to needless death and maiming in Iraq.