Just read Sam Tanenhaus’s article on the neocons in Vanity Fair, the one which generated all the controversy about the quotes from Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The piece is quite good, definitely pick up a copy. The best line from the piece: “The neocons are not usurpers. They are the new establishment …”
To call it an article about the neocons is partly a misnomer. It’s really about Wolfowitz, with biographical profiles of Perle and Kristol woven in to give a context to his place within the larger movement. The piece is quite good, I think, on Wolfowitz, capturing him in far more than wooden or two dimensional terms. It’s not a portrait that will be entirely congenial to either his critics or his allies, though in many respects I think he comes off quite well.
Tanenhaus captures the aspects of the guy that make me just as much an admirer of the guy as I am, in many respects, a critic. The quotes that have generated all the commotion come at the very end of the piece. And really the whole issue of WMD only comes up in any serious way at the tail end of the piece.
In fact, for all the buzz surrounding the WMD quotes, the real stunner comes in the very next paragraph. It’s there where Tanenhaus says Wolfowitz is “confident” that Saddam was “connected” to the original World Trade Center attack in 1993 and that he has “entertained the theory” that Saddam was involved in the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995.
These are both ideas advanced by Laurie Mylroie, a researcher at AEI, whose theories on Saddam (many of which are contained in The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge) are often ridiculed even by some of the neoist of neocons.
