One of my favorite bloggers – Dr. Dean – recently had a post on the pernicious activities of Think Tanks. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Washington DC yesterday, when the right-wing American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held a conference on the need to escalate the War in Iraq (read the executive summary here). This is the so-called SURGE of troops that President Bush is expected to unveil next week (for a report in German read this article (Bushs Truppen-Aufstockung) in Der Spiegel.
American voters made their views clear on November 7: they voted for a disengagement from the Iraq Debacle. Since then, as polls indicate, support for President Bush’s handling of Iraq has plummeted further, and now only 12% of Americans support the Surge. The AEI was not elected by the American voters, yet that is where Bush turns for advice on how to proceed in Iraq. It is important to realize that the "Fellows" at the AEI were the architects of the Iraq invasion. EVERY SINGLE ASSUMPTION of the AEI concerning what the outcome of the US invasion would be turned out to be COMPLETELY WRONG. Yet these are the clowns who are deciding on the lives of additional young men and women who will be SURGED into the Iraqi Civil War.
The chief clown architect of the SURGE is Frederick Kagan of the AEI. This pasty-face chickenhawk never served in the military, but in television interviews he comes across as giddy with excitement when speaking of the prospect of blood flowing in Baghdad (to be sure, the blood of OPCs – other people’s children)- his high-pitched voice breaking into giggles. Kagan has provided President Bush with the intellectual foundation for escalation SURGING the troops, and you can read Kagan’s delusional thoughts here.
But the star of yesterday’s war-fest at the AEI in Washington DC was the presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain (Democratic candidate John Edwards has cleverly called the SURGE the "McCain Doctrine").
Blogger Chicago Dyke was able to sneak into the AEI war-fest and took this photo of Saint John McCain. She also has a brilliant summary of McCain’s speech:
"We are winning, we will continue to win, and surging will bring us even more winning. Winning is what is happening, and will happen, but we need to win with surging too. We haven’t tried that kind of winning yet."
In a future post I hope to delve into the financial backers of the AEI – an interesting WHO’S WHO of American militarism and bigotry.
