One Utah

Bush and Cheney have found a new butt-licker to run the Iraq war.

It appears incoming Sec. Def. Gates have been side-lined along with Baker-Hamilton and the ISG in favor Freddy Kruger Kagan who along with his Daddy Doug (an original signer of the PNAC Principles) published “While American Sleeps” closely coordinated with the neocon takeover in 2000.

Times article subsection - Neocon family calls the shots

FEW neoconservatives can claim to have had as much influence on the course of the Iraq war as the trio of scholars in the Kagan family, writes Sarah Baxter.

Frederick Kagan, 36, is the author of Choosing Victory, a blueprint for the surge adopted by President George W Bush. Just as everybody had begun writing off the influence of the neocons at the White House, genial, chubby-faced Frederick gave the muscular intellectuals a lease of life.

It was at Camp David last June that Kagan, a military historian and fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, outlined his plans for pouring more troops into Iraq to Bush and his war cabinet.

Donald Rumsfeld, the then defense secretary, was unimpressed, but Kagan’s views got another hearing when Bush was searching for ways to ditch the seemingly defeatist recommendations of James Baker’s Iraq Study Group. “Wow, you mean we can still win this war?” a grateful Bush reportedly said.

Kagan’s father Donald, a classicist at Yale University and expert on the Peloponnesian war, could be described as an intellectual progenitor of the conflict. Like many early neocons, Donald, 74, was a leftwinger in his youth but veered to the right over the Vietnam war.

In 1997 he was a signatory with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, of the founding declaration of the neocon Project for a New American Century, which called for “a Reaganite policy of military strength and foreign clarity”.

A year before the September 11 attacks, Donald co-authored a book with Frederick called While America Sleeps about the delusion that the US was invulnerable.

“The peace does not keep itself and though it may be unfashionable to say so, the world needs a policeman,” Donald said.

But it was his elder son Robert, 48, a fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who nailed Iraq under Saddam Hussein as the problem, writing an article called A Way to Oust Saddam during the Clinton years.

Robert, who is married to the American ambassador to Nato, went on to write an essay, Americans are from Mars, after September 11, sparking a heated debate on the growing transatlantic split on the merits of war.

This entry was posted Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Neocons, Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority, War, nazis. Both comments and pings are currently closed.