I wrote skeptically about the new Foreign Policy Initiative, basically the Project for a New American Century part two, populated by the same failed thinkers peddling the same failed ideas that have caused so much needless death and destruction in recent years. For my trouble I was compared to Hutu génocidaires. George Packer was also skeptical of this idea and in response he got a more customary response from the neocon gang — a bunch of BS:
Schmitt also implies that PNAC did not play a role in creating the congressional pressure that ultimately led President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act when he was badly weakened by the Lewinsky scandal. Read the PNAC letters and the rest of the relevant history and decide for yourself. Finally, Schmitt contends that PNAC was a leading post-invasion critic of the handling of the Iraq War. He should post some of the evidence on the group’s web site, where you can find a lengthy 2005 report called “Iraq: Setting the Record Straight,” an ex-post-facto defense of the WMD justification for the war, as well as links to numerous op-eds by PNAC members fighting rearguard battles against the war’s domestic critics — but no trace of the kind of thoroughgoing criticism that might have come to the attention of PNAC’s signatories, who had become leading Bush Administration officials, and made a difference when it mattered.
Just remember that Iranians will love us if only we bomb their country.