Saturday, November 18, 2006

Hey, “Liberal Brookings Institution”

Are you really going to take this guy’s advice?

Posted by olvlzl.

T
he “liberal think tank” The Brookings Institution has asked Peter W. Rodman to join their august ranks of deep thinkers as as “senior fellow”. If you are unfamiliar with Peter W. Rodman you might not know that included in his stellar resume is that line about him being Donald Rumsfeld’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. He was:

Rumsfeld's senior adviser on security strategy and policy involving the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

He comes with a long list of credentials, beginning under that original deep thinker Henry Kissinger. He of the Christmas Bombings. He's also big in PNAC, one of the signers of the infamous 1998 letter to Bill Clinton.

Now, tell me if I’m wrong, but someone who had a position such as the senior adviser on security and policy in the Middle East, Asia and Euope under Rumsfeld does actually have a share in the results of the policy, doesn’t he? I'll admit he gets to glow in the success of a policy but why does he get to glow in the utter, complete, and disastrous failure of a policy? Why, when the bodies are piling up and the region is imploding, would the Brookings Institution get to take him on without anyone asking why it should trust anything he says?

Why does a security advisor become a deep thinker in one of our premier guess pools without someone wondering if he was in on the war that made terrorism more likely? One assumes that he must have agreed with the policy, he stayed on afterall. He wouldn’t have been put against the wall if he left and let it be known that the policy was a total disaster in the making or had just pulled a Cyrus Vance on it. So, his staying until Rumsfeld got the shove can’t be taken as anything but an endorsement of the policies of his utterly, and catastrophically failed administration of his department and the most ill advised war in our history? Can it? It's been obvious that Rumsfeld and this war are a total disaster brought on by a mix of incompetence and arrogance mixed with wishful thinking and probably an equal measure of corruption. Though one imagines the senior levels were in it for the principle of the thing(!).

Why does anyone listen to an institution like the Brookings? Are they impressed by the quality? And shouldn't we reject any alleged news source that calls on institutions like that? And will someone please tell us helots why we shouldn’t ask these questions?