Neo Conned

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon has an interesting post on the Kagan cabal that is behind the surge strategy in Iraq, and at the same time leading the cheers for the strategy in the pages of the WaPo and the Weekly Standard. He focuses on the fact that the Post and their media "watchdog" Howie Kurtz suspend all pretenses of objectivity by not revealing that the pro surge editorial they ran yesterday was written by the brother of the key architect of the strategy.

The larger question is two-fold. He hints at it here:

What is really going on here is that our media and political elite have deemed a small circle of ideologues as our "foreign policy experts." Those are the ones to whom the media turns when they want to present "expert opinion" about this war. The panel of media-designated "experts" always has been, and still is, almost uniformly composed of war advocates. And the expert panel has not changed at all, despite being exposed as the authors and cheerleaders of the greatest strategic disaster in our country's history.

Robert and all the other Kagans, along with their close comrades like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, are at the very epicenter of that incestuous expert clatch. It is imperative to the establishment-protectors like the Howie Kurtzs that their objectivity and credibility and trustworthiness remain beyond reproach.

Is this any way to execute our foreign policy?

But even more...these neo-cons, as well as Richard Perle, who Greenwald leaves aside have been demonstrably wrong on each and every prediction they've made on our great Iraqi adventure. They took Chalabi's hook, they told us we'd be greeted as liberators, that the war wouldn't cost more than $8b, and that there would be no civil war. In short, they told Bush, Cheney and Rove what they wanted to hear. But why are we still listening to them? It was foolish to think that November changed anything. Bush will press forward, because to him, any change in strategy, any hint of withdraw equals defeat. We give the boy king the benefit of the doubt only at our peril, his imperiousness knows few bounds.