Revenge of the Vulcans II

Excellent piece by Craig Unger at Vanity Fair, outlining the path to war in Iran. "The Bush White House has already built the fire," says Unger, "whether it will light the match remains to be seen."

There's a lot to digest in the article, but one of the many interesting aspects is Unger's explanation of how the neoconservatives have been rehabilitated in the Bush administration, after the briefest of exiles. The article also helps illustrate the way conservative think tanks - especially AEI - and journals have played a major role in shaping Bush's disastrous Middle East policy. As this blog matures, I hope we'll begin to be able to capture some of that process in real time. Meanwhile, here's an excerpt from Unger's piece, just after he describes the release of the Iraq Study Group Report, which was generally well-received:

The only American whose opinion mattered, however, was not impressed. Bush, Salon reported, slammed the I.S.G. study as "a flaming turd." If Rice even delivered Scowcroft's message, it had fallen on deaf ears.

Just eight days later, on December 14, Bush found a study that was more to his liking. Not surprisingly, it came from the American Enterprise Institute, the intellectual stronghold of neoconservatism. The author, Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the A.E.I., is the son of Donald Kagan and the brother of Robert Kagan, who signed PNAC's famous 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. According to Kagan, the project began in late September or early October at the instigation of his boss, Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at A.E.I. She decided "it would be helpful to do a realistic evaluation of what would be required to secure Baghdad," Kagan told Vanity Fair.

The project culminated in a four-day planning exercise in early December, Kagan said, that just happened to coincide with the release of the Iraq Study Group report. But he rejected the notion that his study had been initiated by the White House as an alternative to the bipartisan assessment. "I'm aware of some of the rumors," Kagan said. "This was not designed to be an anti-I.S.G. report.… Any conspiracy theories beyond that are nonsense."

[...]

In one sense, the neoconservative hawks—including the authors of "A Clean Break"—have been kept aloft by their failures. The strategic fiasco created by the Iraq war has actually increased the danger posed by Iran to Israel—and with it the likelihood of armed conflict. "[Bush's wars] have put Israel in the worst strategic and operational situation she's been in since 1948," says retired colonel Larry Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell's chief of staff in the State Department. "If you take down Iraq, you eliminate Iran's No. 1 enemy. And, oh, by the way, if you eliminate the Taliban, they might reasonably be assumed to be Iran's No. 2 enemy."

"Nobody thought going into this war that these guys would screw it up so badly, that Iraq would be taken out of the balance of power, that it would implode, and that Iran would become dominant," says Martin Indyk.

Read the rest here.

Labels: American Enterprise Institute, Craig Unger, Frederick Kagan, Iran, Neoconservatives, Vanity Fair

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:25 PM 0 comments

  Revenge of the Vulcans

LA Times: The neocons are back already, and they're behind the "surge."

But now, a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy. A key part of the new Iraq plan that President Bush is expected to announce next week — a surge in U.S. troops coupled with a more focused counterinsurgency effort — has been one of the chief recommendations of these neocons since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

This group — which includes William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard magazine, and Frederick W. Kagan, a military analyst at a prominent think tank, the American Enterprise Institute — was expressing concerns about the administration's blueprint for Iraq even before the invasion almost four years ago.

Kristol and Kagan are the definitive neoconservatives, though the article notes the split within neocon ranks:

Some leading neoconservatives do not embrace the troop surge proposal.

Wolfowitz, for instance, ridiculed the notion that more troops would be needed to secure Iraq than were used in the invasion.

And Richard N. Perle, a former top advisor to the Pentagon who also advocated for smaller troop numbers at the time of the invasion, is known to be skeptical of the idea of a surge.

The plan's advocates acknowledge the split.

"Before the war, I was arguing for a quarter of a million troops in expectations we'd be there five or 10 years," said Gary J. Schmitt, an analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who has worked closely with Kristol and Kagan. "Richard Perle, obviously somebody else who's thought of as a neocon, thought we should go in" with far fewer U.S. forces.

It is, of course, also a repudiation of the Rumsfeld doctrine.

Still, despite the disagreements, this is the same crowd. Only the bad ideas have changed.

(h/t to chasm at Daily Kos)

Labels: Frederick Kagan, Iraq, Neoconservatives, William Kristol

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 4:45 PM 0 comments