{"id":190381,"date":"2009-12-04T16:37:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-04T21:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/12\/04\/we-are-unbelievably-screwed-10\/"},"modified":"2009-12-04T16:37:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-04T21:37:00","slug":"we-are-unbelievably-screwed-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/12\/04\/we-are-unbelievably-screwed-10\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are Unbelievably Screwed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that when General Stanley McChrystal was looking for filling in the dots on his Afghanistan escalation plan, he turned to the think tank Washington, DC, and created a &#8220;strategic assessment group&#8221;, among the members of that group, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/dangerroom\/2009\/12\/how-the-afghan-surge-was-sold\/\">Fred Kagan and his wife, Kimberly Kagan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If there is a bright shining center of intellect in the universe, anyone in the Kagan clan are located in a dank corner where people still believe that leeches cure cancer.<\/p>\n<p>They are <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">always<\/span> wrong.  All you need to look at is their history on Iraq, Saddam, and WMD.<\/p>\n<p>On a more substantive note, this sort of lobbying, because when you look at the names on the group, they are largely idiots who are respected by the &#8220;very serious people&#8221; inside the Beltway, should be something that members of the military should <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">not<\/span> be doing.<\/p>\n<p>The group was not about getting answers, it was not aboug evaluating potential options, it was about Beltway street cred.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that when General Stanley McChrystal was looking for filling in the dots on his Afghanistan escalation plan, he turned to the think tank Washington, DC, and created a &#8220;strategic assessment group&#8221;, among the members of that group, Fred Kagan and his wife, Kimberly Kagan. If there is a bright shining center of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1153,981,978,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afghanistan","category-civil-war","category-politics","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}