Caveat Emptor: Buy McCain, Get Kagan and Woolsey

[laststeamtrain]

Caveat Emptor: Buy McCain,
Get Kagan and Woolsey
by John Taylor

A new president brings fresh eyes to old problems, but more importantly, the head of the executive branch has the flexibility to reject the failed policies of his predecessor without gravely wounding his own credibility. Unfortunately, John McCain has promised, should he become president, to continue the disastrous Middle East policies of the current administration. Worse, he has chosen his advisers from the ranks of the neocons who conspired using falsehood and fear to hoodwink the U.S. into invading Iraq.

McCain's principal Middle East point men are Brussels-based pundit Robert Kagan and ex-CIA director James Woolsey, both signers of the infamous 1998 Project for the New American Century letter advocating the use of force to remove Saddam from power. McCain had sought to add yet another neocon to his coterie, Robert Bruce Zoellick, but the Bush administration tapped Zoellick for the top job at the World Bank (then-president Paul Wolfowitz having gotten himself into difficulties there for taking the neocons' unspoken credo, "screw the Arabs," rather too literally).

When James Woolsey, who spent much of his short tenure as CIA director scouring the agency's files for secret data about flying saucers, isn't trying to get the U.S. to attack Iran, he's pushing a wild scheme to bankrupt OPEC by substituting corn-based ethanol for gasoline. Woolsey's ideas are so impractical and cuckoo that they make one think alien abductions do in fact occur from time to time.

Robert Kagan, like almost all neocon Middle East experts who want to remake the Muslim world, knows little about the area, has never lived there, and understands no Arabic or Farsi. He is also a self-styled military expert who has never served in the armed forces. Perhaps because Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, he thinks some of her military expertise has rubbed off on him. After all, if Hillary can say that she learned crisis management from Bill, although I'd be willing to bet he never let her answer the phone when it rang at 3:00 a.m., what's to stop Kagan from making a similar claim?

As for Nuland, she apparently learned enough about war to make her a worthy ambassador to NATO, the world's premier military alliance, by working for several years as Dick Cheney's deputy national security adviser. Although Cheney never served in the military, the five draft deferments he received during the Vietnam War must be something of a record, at least for the state of Wyoming, and deserve some sort of special recognition. Certainly Cheney has, along with the rest of the Bush administration, demonstrated expertise in sending other people's children off to war.

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Kagan has made a number of amusing but incorrect observations and predictions about the Iraq war and occupation. To give a few examples, Kagan stated in March of 2004 that the "rather remarkable truth is that have made enormous strides towards liberal democracy," and the U.S. "may have turned the corner in terms of security." He also observed "there are hopeful signs that the Iraqis of differing religious, ethnic, and political persuasions can work together … a far cry from the predictions before the war both here and in Europe that a liberated Iraq would fracture into feuding clans." Kagan also made the usual prewar neocon claims about Iraqi WMDs: "obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find – and there will be plenty." What seems strange is not that Kagan has been consistently wrong about Iraq, but that no one seems to remember or care. Kagan's errors have in no way disqualified him from being one of John McCain's principal advisers on Iraq and the Middle East. In this regard, Kagan is no different from the rest of the neocon fraternity, which although thoroughly discredited by events still finds a respectful hearing in government and the media.

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http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=47486