White House rebuffed Clinton-Petraeus plan to arm Syrian rebels: report

[Whisp]

74. found the names: Fred and Kimberly Kagan (Hardball link)

http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/12/19/gen-petraeus-neo-con-connection-is-really-strange/

I’d like to know why General Petraeus was taking day-to-day advice from people on the other side of the Iraq war argument.

Fred and Kimberly Kagan are hawks. They share the ideology of those who backed the Iraq War. Why are they on the inside of an administration elected based on its opposition to the Iraq war?

I am one of those who believed from square one that the war in Iraq was an ideological war pushed from the outset by those who wanted us to overthrow the Iraq government and install ourselves in Baghdad. They got their way under a less-than-informed President, George W. Bush. Now we discover that a pair of them, the Kagans, have been right there in the room with the head of the Afghan mission, advising him every step of the way.

Why? Why did General Petraeus assume the right to allow people who represent the very opposite of President Obama’s philosophy to advise him? What agenda was his seeking here? What was he buying into? Was he buying into the hawkish agenda of those who advocated war on Iraq in the first place? If so, why was he working for President Obama who stood out there against that war?

---etc.

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/19/neocons-guided-petraeus-on-afghan-war/

Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War
December 19, 2012

Exclusive: Gen. David Petraeus was so cozy with neocon think-tankers that he ensconced two of them in his Afghan War command and granted them top-secret access to U.S. military policy. One later leveraged Petraeus’s friendship to impress military contractors for funding support, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Even after the Iraq War disaster and Barack Obama’s election in 2008, neoconservatives retained their influence over U.S. war policies in Afghanistan through their close ties to George W. Bush’s national security holdovers, such as Gen. David Petraeus who partnered with neocon war hawks in escalating the Afghan War.

How tight Petraeus’s relationship was with two neocons in particular, Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, was explored Wednesday in a Washington Post article by war correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran who described how Petraeus installed the husband-and-wife team in U.S. offices in Kabul, granted them top-secret clearances and let them berate military officers about war strategy.

Gen. David Petraeus posing before the U.S. Capitol with Kimberly Kagan, founder and president of the Institute for the Study of War. (Photo credit: ISW’s 2011 Annual Report)

Though the Kagans received no pay from the U.S. government, they drew salaries from their respective think tanks which are supported by large corporations, including military contractors with interests in extending the Afghan War. Frederick Kagan works for the American Enterprise Institute, and Kimberly Kagan founded the Institute for the Study of War [ISW] in 2007 and is its current president.

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from the commentary on that article:

It’s much worse – the whole Kagan clan is involved. Fred was the architect of the surge while his wife Kimberly penned an article in the Weekly Standard discussing how successful it was and of course Fox Noise parroted it. Robert Kagan, Fred’s brother, was an editor at the Standard at the time. Later, Hillary Clinton appointed Victoria Nuland, Robert’s wife as State spokesperson. Victoria served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO. Robert admitted in a Q&A interview last March that he was serving in Hillary’s State department while at the same time “advising” Mitt Romney....