Neoconservative

At a conference on leadership in counterinsurgency at the National Press Club sponsored by Marine Corps University, Eliot Cohen, the respected Johns Hopkins scholar who advised Condoleezza Rice at the tail end of the Bush administration, slowly and steadily built up a critique of the Obama administration on Afghanistan. Obama’s apparent reconsideration of counterinsurgency strategy [...]

The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year. Both Kagans advised the McChrystal strategy [...]

We knew it on Friday, when Bill Kristol praised President Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, but the degree to which neoconservatives are happy with the plan is striking. “He’s definitely saying no to pulling back,” said Fred Kagan, at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative conference today in Washington. “It was a gutsy [...]

I’m at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington for “Afghanistan: Planning for Success,” the first conference put on by the Foreign Policy Initiative, the new neoconservative think tank/messaging operation. Before the first panel kicked off, FPI directors Bill Kristol, Dan Senor and Robert Kagan milled around in the hall, near the breakfast table, along with Cliff [...]

One of the things I most anticipate about the next four years is how the cohort that so massively proved that they can’t be trusted to run or assess U.S. foreign policy is going to lecture the Obama administration on doing so. I used to think they should just be ignored, but I simply lack [...]