Brookings hasn't been truly liberal in ages. the rightward move behan back in the Reagan administration, when they brought in a Republican for their top spot.

The "scholar" business is funny because so many are on soft money and and places like AEI are position paper mills rather than real "think tanks". The "scholars" who get quoted tend to be these hacks or ex-politicos who have gotten positions designed to dress up university foreign affairs or area studies programs. Even the legit academics often have a little too much connection to specific interests via their funders.

The connection to the Cold war is important because the demise of the old Soviet Union (and Soviet Bloc) essentially took away the neocons reason to exist. They needed a new evil doing enemey that they could construct into a cartoon and now they have one. As in the Cold War, much of the liberal wing of the foreign policy community practices a "lite" version of the neo-con formula. The realist versus neo-con debate tends to mirror the hawks versus the moderates from the Cold War.

Are you hoping to grovel and nod long enough to one day be one the the AEI wise men who gets to play "serious analyst" on TV? Because that's about the only person I can imagine would write such drivel about this post. If you find this "astounding," you've probaly been spouting the same kind of crap that O'Hanlon and the rest of the imbeciles you run with have.

Get used to it dilrod. You guys have been dead wrong about every single thing that matters in your "area of expertise." The only people that still think you idjits are experts are you guys yourselves and the transcribers in the press corps. The rest of us can see you don't know shinola from a hole in the ground. You do as well taking on Glenn here as you did in making guesses about what would happen when we attacked Iraq. You're just not very good at what you do.

There are times for hemming and hawing and times for course correction. I can't see the point of hemming and hawing. Even so (as said here under "No accounting for Clinton"), the candidates are not even doing that.

Power's memo left me cold. It flags the Beltway problem but mostly hoists a "Time For a Change" banner over things Obama's said. These evade one of the key drivers that got us into Iraq and is keeping us there.

For months now most of the world has learned why Iraq's oil law is so pivotal to Bush. Here it's billed as "fair share" benchmark. Activists, including labor unions, have lobbied Democrats to part company with its privatization scheme. (The law is discussed at http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/07/3052/). They've made modest headway

Jeff Cohen lobbied Olbermann to ask the candidates if they'll let Iraq decide what to do with its principal asset. The Obama campaign would do well to formulate an answer in anticipation of such a question, not just string together a foreign policy out of campaign rhetoric.

I've remarked on this elsewhere, but I guess I still don't understand of what precisely these folks are scholars, and from what cloth such "legitimate" foreign policy scholarship" woven. As an historian, I may prejudice for ground level analysis of primary sources and the specificities of cultures, language and politics. However,m it still struck me as horribly odd - not to mention intellectually dishonest - that our so called experts of Southwest Asian Geo-Political strategy (to wit - O'Hanlon and Pollack) appear to have little or none of the language skills associated with these areas. Such a lack can be forgiven among top level policy makers since they cannot be held responsible for every foreign language with which they may deal, but one might suspect that people who fancy themselves "scholars" of the region might actually bother to learn the languages of the areas they deal with. Apologies in advance to Ed Said, but at least the old Orientalists sought to learn something about the people they exploited. And in the meantime, those scholars who do have the relevant expertise in spades find themselves - think Juan Cole - shouted down, driven from potential Ivy League jobs (Yale), and dismissed as unserious.

As noted in a previous comment, her last name is "Power," not "Powers."

More substantively, in her piece, the following bullet point deserves serious (as it were) scrutiny:

The United States has not talked directly to Iran at a high level, and they have continued to build their nuclear weapons program, wreak havoc in Iraq, and support terror."

This is impressive. Not only does she ratify the unproven GOP talking point that Iran is wreaking havoc in Iraq (a neo-con claim which alternates rapidly with the claim that all the havoc in Iraq is from Al-Qaeda), she purports that Iran has an ongoing nuclear-weapons program. I don't believe that even the Bushies have made this claim, even if they suspect (not unreasonably, perhaps) that Iran's atomic-energy program is a cover-story for weapons work.

Obama, for all his considerable virtues, has a very bad habit of ratifying GOP talking points, especially regarding "partisanship" and "moral (read: religious) values," as noted here: http://www.correntewire.com/why_was_there_only_one_set_of_footprints_obama_was_carrying_god_again

* Glenn refers us to a woman who thinks invading another country is just fine.
* Thinks discussion of diplomatic strategy should be public, keeping the object of said strategy informed at all times,
* Is a despairing that someone he has called "deceitful", a "war lover", "underhanded", and a writer of "adolescent war pornography", is reticent to let Glenn interview him. Now that's detachment from reality.

More interesting is this....

I conducted an interview today with Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution about his views on the war and his trip to Iraq. I will post the transcript in a couple of days along with some thoughts about it.

I wonder why the unabridged version isn't available somewhere, and why a few days to think about it are needed. My guess is that O'Hanlon has caught on that Glenn is a hostile interviewer more interested in making himself look good than getting any real information from the interviewee. My guess is that we'll see an edited version, spun like cotton candy.