Any member of an extremist group tends to be critical of the other members. For a long time the neocons appeared monolithic from the outside, but once things started falling apart, some of them began to go public to make it clear that any failure was not theirs -- it was Bush's. Or Rumsfeld's. Or Rice's. The plan was great, they maintained, but the people who carried it out were incompetent. Although we do have Richard Perle now saying that maybe they shouldn't have invaded Iraq after all. (Hey, no big deal. It's not like he flubbed a joke and thus deeply offended and demoralized hundreds of thousands of American soldiers.) Here are some quotes from the back lines:

********************************** From discussion on CNN

I think we have an administration today that is dysfunctional. And if it can't get itself together to organize a serious program for finding nuclear material on its way to the United States, then it ought to be replaced by an administration that can. ~Richard Perle, former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, former Bush brain-truster on the Defense Policy Board, key promoter of the war in Iraq

It's [Bush's behavior] unhinged. It suggests this man has lost his mind. No one objectively could look at the way this war has been conducted, whether you were for it, as I was, or against it, and say that it has been done well. It's a disaster. For him to say it's a fantastic job [that Rumsfeld is doing] suggests the president has lost it, I'm sorry, there's no other way to say it.....These people must be held accountable. ~Andrew Sullivan, conservative writer

***************************************** 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." ~Richard Perle,

It now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center" -- starting with President Bush. ~David Rose, quoting David Frum, former speechwriter for Mr. Bush, who coined the phrase "axis of evil."

I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional. ~Kenneth Adelman, Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005 and once wrote that winning in Iraq "would be a cakewalk."

Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself -- what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" -- is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." ~David Rose, writing in Vanity Fair. See http://xrl.us/AltQuote1, source of other quotes above and below.

[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity. ~Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, founder of the Center for Security Policy

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. ~Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar

The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer -- three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq. ~Kenneth Adelman