{"id":1581,"date":"2011-01-04T11:24:34","date_gmt":"2011-01-04T11:24:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1581"},"modified":"2014-03-06T11:20:10","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T16:20:10","slug":"well-worth-the-time-to-read-in-toto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=1581","title":{"rendered":"Well worth the time to read in toto"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tome Engelhardt&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tomdispatch.com\/blog\/175336\/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_war_is_a_drug\"><i>The Urge to Surge: Washington\u2019s 30-Year High<\/i><\/a> is a fine think piece for the New Year, and puts the present moment into highly relevant context. Down towards the end is this little trip down Memory Lane:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC [Project for the New American Century] statement urging the United States to go for the military option in the twenty-first century would, however, prove something more than your typical crew of think-tank types.  After all, not so many years later, after a disputed presidential election settled by the Supreme Court, Dick Cheney would be vice president; I. Lewis (\u201cScooter\u201d) Libby would be his right-hand man; Donald Rumsfeld would be Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense; Zalmay Khalilzad, head of the Bush-Cheney transition team at the Department of Defense and then the first post- invasion U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, as well as ambassador to Iraq and UN ambassador; Elliot Abrams, special assistant to the president with a post on the National Security Council; Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs; Aaron Friedberg, Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning in the office of the vice president; and Jeb Bush, governor of Florida.  (Others like John Bolton, who signed on to PNAC later, would be no less well employed.)<\/p>\n<p>This may, in fact, be the first example in history of a think tank coming to power and actually putting its blue-sky suggestions into operation as government policy, or perhaps it\u2019s the only example so far of a government-in-waiting masquerading as an online think tank. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I see little hope that the present-day DC crowd will grok their own hubris and repent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tome Engelhardt&#8217;s The Urge to Surge: Washington\u2019s 30-Year High is a fine think piece for the New Year, and puts the present moment into highly relevant context. Down towards the end is this little trip down Memory Lane: The 23 men and two women who signed the initial PNAC [Project for the New American Century] [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argybargy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2303,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1581\/revisions\/2303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}