Ending the Iraq Catastrophe

President Barack Obama will talk about “a promise kept” as he brings the last U.S. troops in Iraq “home for the holidays”; the neocons will try to spin the exit as “victory, at last”; but the hard truth is that the Iraq War has been a largely self-inflicted strategic defeat for the United States.

When Bush’s war bandwagon rolled past – with the neocons at the controls – nearly everyone who mattered clambered onboard, from star Democratic senators like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to the brightest lights of the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and on and on.

The unabashed neoconservatives are still holding down lucrative think-tank jobs (and some key posts in the Obama administration). They regularly opine on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. They are recruited by leading Republican presidential candidates.

Mitt Romney entrusted neocons to write the “white paper” on his future foreign policy. Rick Perry joined with the neocons in berating Obama for deviating even slightly from the demands of Israel’s Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to opinion polls, it also seems likely that the neocons will follow the victorious Republican nominee – whoever that is – back into the White House in 2013. Just as the Wall Street bankers landed on their feet, so too do the neocons