Fred Kagan is a Dick

I know that among whatever readers I have there is a strong contingent of NPR listeners and PBS watchers. Up until very recently, they were the only source of sane news coverage around.

So it is particularly galling to me when completely discredited people are given a megaphone on the public airwaves.

Fred Kagan is a Dick.

And The News Hour with Jim Lehrer just offered him up as an expert commentator on today’s testimony by Petraeus and Crocker before Congress.

In response, I offer you Fred Kagan as..........

the first installment of

“Your Guide to Discredited Hacks

The Essential Consumer Guide to Whom to Ignore.”

Fred Kagan – Resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), former professor of military history at West Point, self-described military “expert”. Kagan has been among the most pompous and un-repentant of the original Iraq War cheerleaders. There is no outcome that is too thin for him to declare an astounding self-vindication.

Glenzilla summarizes him here, but this is my favorite quote:

The first thing I want to say is that: The Civil War in Iraq is over. And until
the American domestic political debate catches up with that fact, we are going
to have a very hard time discussing Iraq on the basis of reality.

So hey – great news! The civil war in Iraq is over! No more sectarian killing! Does this mean we can leave now?

Here is a little bit of old Fred’s biography:

Frederick Kagan, along with father Donald and brother Robert, belongs to the influential neoconservative Kagan family, in the same vein as the Kristol and Podhoretz clans. Like his father and brother, Frederick favors hawkish foreign policies and extravagant defense budgets. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and is associated with the now largely defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which his brother cofounded.

[Snip]

Established in 1997 by a number of leading neoconservative writers and pundits associated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a nonprofit organization whose declared aim is "to promote American global leadership." PNAC, which has been largely inactive since late 2005, played an important role building public and official support for a post-Cold War interventionist agenda in the Middle East and other global hotspots both before and after the 9/11 terror attacks. Such was its apparent influence that some scholars gave it singular importance in shaping policy during the George W. Bush administration. Writing in the Sociological Quarterly, David Altheide and Jennifer Grimes argued that "PNAC, working with a compliant news media, developed, sold, enacted, and justified a war with Iraq."

Now I have no issue with PBS, in this case, propping Kagan up as a foil against critics of Administration policy. What I DO object to is using him as some kind of legitimate intellectual voice on U.S. policy without fully disclosing his role as a primary architect.

Fred Kagan has been wrong about absolutely everything since BEFORE the onset of this war. And every statement he makes is intended to justify his original error. What does it take to be considered an expert? A history of utter and abject failure to show correct judgment?

Even if --by some miracle -- we are able to leave Iraq in anything other than stunning defeat, the policies he advocated will be judged as a failure. They already are in the minds of the American people, regardless of the outcome at this point.

So you should ignore every single word that comes out of the mouth of this charlatan, and demand that PBS seek out intelligent policy experts to help us find our way out of this morass.

Check out the action buttons to the right; I have added the appropriate PBS link for The News Hour.