"if you hated the Project for a New American Century you’re going to
despise the
Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the freshly minted Washington think-tank that seems to have been
granted the foreign policy franchise by the
Obama administration.
I have written about their nation-building counter-insurgency doctrine
at length: it is based on the
alleged success of the Iraqi surge – or Surge, as our columnist
Kelley Vlahos terms it – and its principal author is
Gen. David Petraeus, the Bush administration’s Caesar-like figure whose exploits are now claimed by
both parties.
The Bushies may be out of power, but their dream of a regional transformation in the Middle East lives on in the
CNAS-
Petraeus COIN strategy, whose advocates boast of their ability to effect change on whole societies. It is a liberal version of the same old imperialist game, this time played in the name of global uplift. It is neoconservatism with a human face.
These left-neocons have their own cadre of experts, who are trotted out to imbue our current wrong-headed policy of escalating the Afghan war and dragging in Pakistan with an aura of faux credibility. Prominent among these is
Tom Ricks, the
Washington Post’s Pentagon correspondent and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security."
Justin Raimondo
The Rule of the ‘Experts’ by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com