Kristol and History

A reader writes:

What strikes me about Kristol's rhetoric of late, and Bush's Vietnam analogy, is how this War's supporters --more so then it's critics--have "given up". Chait is right, Kristol is smart, he knows how this will all end. He too, like us, has watched the moments of promise, of crumbling statues, of elections, disintegrate in chaos. He no longer has any interest in finding a way of out Iraq, instead he's preparing for a way out of "Iraq Syndrome". When Kristol says:

"They sense that history is progressing away from them"

It is actually a much deeper and profound thought then you give him credit for. We have to remember that this has always been about "History" to the Neo-Cons. They were going to be the triumphant liberators of Iraq, upon whom books and movies would be based, they were going to knock the "greatest generation" off their pedestal through the sheer magnanimity of their glorious re-shaping of the world. But what Kristol, Perle, Bush et al. are now left with is a harsh reality, where to be effective they would have to engage in the relativism of picking lesser evils and there's nothing glorious about that. So instead, they've just skipped a few pages in the history books, to where we all wonder "who's to blame".  That's what Bush was doing yesterday. Building an alibi. Blame the detractors for the negative externalities of my war and then get off the hook for blowing it.