Cadre of Iraq War propagandists/architects renames itself.Project for a New American Century = The Foreign Policy Initiative

I pass this along because it's essential to know who's who. Knowing who's behind the thinking (and the fundraising) of an ostensibly "brand new" Washington DC think tank is even more useful than knowing which evil international corporations with major image problems have changed names. In the case of the latter, a somewhat recent example that comes to mind is that of Clear Channel, which spawned Live Nation, which is attempting to conduct a merger with Ticketmaster.

Now the cadre of cynical propagandists who posed as "experts" recommending the invasion of Iraq, a group that once went under the name of Project for a New American Century, has reconstituted itself as The Foreign Policy Initiative. According to an item in The Huffington Post, which was posted on March 31, 2009:

Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- with a half-day conference on "the path to success in Afghanistan" (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that "the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan" almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force.

[...]

'PNAC=MISSION ACCOMPLISHED': Kristol and Kagan -- with support from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld -- co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s with the mission "to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Military force was always an option, and often the preferred one. Indeed, the group led the charge to get President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and it served as a key lobby for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But with neoconservatism now all but dead and its principles soundly rejected in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the face of PNAC 2.0 -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- is less bellicose. Indeed, as Duss recently noted, "this new very innocuous sounding Foreign Policy Institute" indicates that neoconservatives "understand that they have something of an image problem," adding that it is "encouraging" that they "have some relation to reality." Yet there is no reason to believe there will be much of an ideological shift from its its predecessor, as its main founders -- especially Kristol -- are still deeply wedded to neoconservatism. Indeed, Michael Goldfarb, PNAC alum and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter yesterday: "PNAC=Mission Accomplished; New mission begins tomorrow morning with the launch of FPI."

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Despite the failures of neoconservatism, FPI's mission statement contains the neo-neocon buzz words: military engagement in the world, "rogue regimes," "rogue states," "spread...freedom," "strong military" (with a "defense budget" to back it up), "fascism," "communism," and "pre-9/11 tactics." Discussing FPI with Duss last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? "There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven," Duss replied. He added that "the way it works in Washington, if you're arguing for more military intervention which necessitates more military expenditures, you're always going to find someone to fund your think-tank."

O.K., now, the thing is, I'm not really interested in things that Rachel Maddow has to say, and I have no idea who Matt Duss is. But the basic reporting here is sound, and as such, I pass it along to the reader. What with the creeping demise of actual journalism of any kind, one has to take bits of information as one finds them and simply resist the temptation to accept half-baked interpretations of it. Fewer actual reporters and dwindling budgets for overseas bureaus mean that formerly reputable news-reporting organizations are becoming, to an increasing extent, news-interpreting organizations, the task of thinking critically and reflectively becomes maybe more difficult. I don't know... Maybe it doesn't!

And also: I don't think it's bad for people -- even trigger-happy would-be Cold Warriors -- to formulate and express their ideas. I don't even think it's bad for them to, uh, strategize. I do think, however, that it's important to bear in mind the hypocrisy of Kristol in particular, who has been among the lunatics who have deployed the opportunistic and deeply ludicrous slogan Defund The Left! as a way of inveighing against ideas too bothersome to argue on their merits. The phrase attempted to popularize the specious notion that, for example, 'the media' and 'the academy' are spheres of American life that, perniciously, are pervaded by left-wingers, atheists, Marxists (strange, considering that Kristol's dad was, after all, a Trotskyist) and terrorist-coddlers.

I call this hypocrisy, because...well, in effect, Kristol is inviting his political opponents to have a gander at just which -- ahem -- 'disinterested' entities are footing the bill for his and Bob Kagan's singular brand of 'scholarship' and emm, 'journalism'. Or is 'advocacy' maybe a better word?

In the wake of the Iranian elections, it should be unsurprising that this exact same group of people -- whom we might call The "Bomb Iran" contingent -- has expressed a newfound concern for The Iranian People. An empathic bunch.