LAT: Analysis: Behind troop surge, a Neocon force

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-neocons4jan04,0,779950.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Ever since Iraq began spiraling toward chaos, the war's intellectual architects -- the so-called neoconservatives -- have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration.

Paul Wolfowitz, who was the Defense Department's most senior neocon, was shipped off to the World Bank. His Pentagon colleague Douglas Feith departed for academia. John Bolton left the State Department for the United Nations.

But other neocons have moved back into the mainstream of steering Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week -- a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort -- has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein.

This group -- which includes William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick Kagan, a military analyst at the American Enterprise Institute -- was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago. In these neoconservatives' view, not enough troops were being set aside to stabilize the country. They also worried that the Pentagon had formulated a plan that concentrated too heavily on killing insurgents rather than securing law and order for Iraqi citizens.

They have long advocated for a more classic counterinsurgency campaign: a manpower-heavy operation that would take U.S. soldiers out of their large bases dotted across the country and push them into small outposts in troubled towns and neighborhoods to interact with ordinary Iraqis.

Until now, it was an argument that had fallen on deaf ears.

He bagan the group and was recruting and writing about it quite awhile ago. They should ship all of them to Iraq.

Commentary made this big shift from left to right.

The neocons ran the military plan for Invasion Lite over the objections of pentagon brass, and the objectors were shown the pasture. The neocons, allied with the neoliberals, put their guy Bremer in charge of the occupation where he went consistently against pentagon advice and allowed the neoliberals to play economics lab 101 with Iraq. They have not "long advocated for a more classic counterinsurgency campaign: a manpower-heavy operation that would take U.S. soldiers out of their large bases dotted across the country and push them into small outposts in troubled towns and neighborhoods to interact with ordinary Iraqis." Unless by 'long' one means since they finished reading 'Fiasco' sometime late last year. What a pile of revisionist bullshit. I am sick of their idiocy. Every last one of them belongs in jail.