Sunday, October 11, 2009

Harman - seeking counsel of neocon uberhawks; What's new?

Why it is bad to have Harman in Congress. No matter how wrong they get things, she'll always listen to the neocons.
WASHINGTON - As intellectual architects of the controversial “surge’’ strategy in Iraq in 2007, military scholars Frederick and Kimberly Kagan have been frequent targets of the left, derided as “warmongers’’ and “cheerleaders’’ of the neoconservative ideology that advocates a muscular foreign policy to spread American values.

Now, with a new administration in power, the influential husband-and-wife team has emerged again, this time at the center of the debate over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.

The pair, both former instructors at West Point, were on the advisory panel that helped General Stanley A. McChrystal, the US commander, form his classified assessment to President Obama calling for more troops. And they have publicly been talking up their own view that 40,000 to 45,000 additional troops are needed to bolster the counterinsurgency mission.
[...]
Some Democratic lawmakers remain wary of being associated publicly with a couple that the American Conservative magazine recently called “superhawks.’’ An associate of Kimberly Kagan requested that the Democratic members of Congress the Kagans have recently briefed - including Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin of Michigan, Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, and Congresswoman Jane Harman of California - not be identified because they may not want their constituencies to know the Kagans are advising them.
Just a quick reminder of who Fred Kagan is. He's a fake "scholar" with the fake think-tank American Enterprise Institute who's been one of the biggest and most influential neocon war cheerleaders around. Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com had this to say about him:
Other than Bill Kristol and Fred's brother, war cheerleader Robert Kagan, nobody has been more wrong about more things with regard to Iraq than supreme war theorist Fred Kagan. He's also deemed by the establishment media and the Bush administration to be the most respectable and knowledgeable expert on Iraq. Within that depressing contradiction lies most of the answers as to why we have destroyed that country and will continue to do so indefinitely.
How could anybody really take advice from somebody like him after all that's happened?