Neocon Gaffney Denies Being A Neocon, Blames Rest Of The World For Iraq Failures

Sent in by DP Mason

Frank Gaffney is the latest NeoCon to reject the 'America Must Dominate The World' movement of right-wing politicians, defence industry lobbyists and foreign policy analysts as their dream project of transforming Iraq descends even deeper into a bloodbath of appalling strategic failure.

The strategy was 100% NeoCon, but now they don't want to claim ownership.

Gaffney is the founder and current president the Centre for Security Policy, one of the leading neo-conservative brain trusts that have transformed America's foreign policy since September 11, 2001.

He put his name to the original Project For The New American Century's 1997 'Statement of Principles' , along with current US Vice-President Dick Cheney, World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz and disgraced White House power player L Lewis Libby, which stated, "We aim to make the case for American global leadership".

They made their case all right, and it sure sounded good on paper, and on their flash web site, it just hasn't turned out so well when it comes to making it a reality.

Along with fellow NeoCon founder Francis Fukuyama and cheerleader Richard Perle, Gaffney is now denying the original intent of the movement was to place America front and centre in world leadership, and most remarkably of all, Gaffney now claims the movement never even existed.

"I'm not entirely sure what the term neo-con means," Gaffney said last night on ABC's Lateline, playing monumentally dumb. "No-one has issued party cards."

He did, however, acknowledge that the original NeoCon plan to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the Middle East has failed, for now at least, despite the relatively successful elections in January of this year.

"I think what we were trying to do," said Gaffney, "was to create conditions under which the Iraqi people would feel secure in their lives...I think it certainly would have been preferable to do something different than we did..."

Gaffney also desperately tried to deflect blame for the War On Iraq fiasco - which has already cost the US some $270 billion ($1 trillion or more in long-term costs) and the lives of more than 2300 US soldiers - from falling on the head of his old mate, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld shouldn't have to step down, Gaffney reckons, because the failure of the War On Iraq was not Rumsfeld's alone. Gaffney blames everyone from "Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran" to "the rest of the world" for the rise and ongoing carnage dealt out by the insurgency.

No, Gaffney says, this is not the time for anyone like Rumsfeld to accept some responsibility for the Iraq blunders. People just don't see the same Rumsfeld that he knows, and they "are overlooking some important qualities that he brings to the job. Experience, steadiness, purpose, a command of the big picture."

Unless that big picture is, of course, a free and democratic Iraq that is not being torn apart by dozens of executions each day, the thickening of the ranks of Al Qeada and the destruction of mosques, vital infrastructure and the weakening of the supremacy of the US Military machine.