If you’re a foreign policy professional interested in supporting Hillary Clinton, you may have found yourself at “Foreign Policy Professionals for Hillary with Robert Kagan, Julianne Smith and Amanda Sloat”, a campaign-sponsored DC fundraiser that, yes, featured Robert Kagan.
It’s one thing for prominent Republicans to say they support Hillary, but having Robert Kagan help you raise campaign funds is ridiculous. Here’s some fun insight from a foreign policy “expert” that still thinks the Iraq war was the right decision:
When Robbie Martin, a filmmaker who recently produced a three-part documentary on the neoconservative movement, asked how Clinton plans to deal with Ukraine, Kagan responded enthusiastically.
“I know Hillary cares more about Ukraine than the current president does,” Kagan replied. “[Obama] said to me [that he wouldn’t arm Ukraine because] he doesn’t want a nuclear war with Russia,” he added, rolling his eyes dismissively. “I don’t think Obama cares about Putin anymore at all. I think he’s hopeless.”
Hmm… a fund raiser headlined by a Republican who never met a war he didn’t like who thinks President Obama is “hopeless” on Russia. Perhaps Hillary is taking his advice by pushing the Trump -Putin link. Or maybe she’s taking the advice of Mr. Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs who famously got caught on tape saying “Fuck the EU” regarding their attempt to broker a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis.
Why does Kagan support Hillary? Because she, unlike the unwashed masses, really GETS the importance of sending young men and women in uniform to die in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably half a dozen other countries:
Kagan complained that Americans are “so focused on the things that have gone wrong in recent years, they miss the sort of basic underlying, unusual quality of the international order that we’ve been living in.
“It’s not just Donald Trump,” Kagan said. “I think you can find in both parties a very strong sense that we don’t need to be out there anymore.”
“If, as I hope, Hillary Clinton is elected, she is going to immediately be confronting a country that is not where she is,” he said. “She is a believer in this world order. But a great section of the country is not and is going to require persuasion and education.”
Just what does that “world order” look like?
Here’s what Robert Kagan famously said about the Iraq War in February 2004 in an article titled The Right War for the Right Reasons:
WHATEVER THE RESULTS OF THAT SEARCH [for those pesky weapons of mass destruction], it will continue to be the case that the war was worth fighting, and that it was necessary. For the people of Iraq, the war put an end to three decades of terror and suffering. The mass graves uncovered since the end of the war are alone sufficient justification for it. Assuming the United States remains committed to helping establish a democratic government in Iraq, that will be a blessing both to the Iraqi people and to their neighbors. As for those neighbors, the threat of Saddam's aggression, which hung over the region for more than two decades, has finally been eliminated. The prospects for war in the region have been substantially diminished by our action.
It is also becoming clear that the battle of Iraq has been an important victory in the broader war in which we are engaged, a war against terror, against weapons proliferation, and for a new Middle East. Already, other terror-implicated regimes in the region that were developing weapons of mass destruction are feeling pressure, and some are beginning to move in the right direction. Libya has given up its weapons of mass destruction program. Iran has at least gestured toward opening its nuclear program to inspection. The clandestine international network organized by Pakistan's A.Q. Khan that has been so central to nuclear proliferation to rogue states has been exposed. From Iran to Saudi Arabia, liberal forces seem to have been encouraged. We are paying a real price in blood and treasure in Iraq. But we believe that it is already clear--as clear as such things get in the real world--that the price of the liberation of Iraq has been worth it.
Besides being an ignorant idiot who has been wrong about pretty much everything since he appears to have entered the foreign policy profession, Kagan also really likes the idea of “liberating” Syria:
[J]ust as in the 1990s, when Europeans could address the crisis in the Balkans only with the U.S. playing the dominant military role, so again America will have to take the lead, provide the troops, supply the bulk of the air power and pull together those willing and able to join the effort.
What would such an effort look like? First, it would require establishing a safe zone in Syria, providing the millions of would-be refugees still in the country a place to stay and the hundreds of thousands who have fled to Europe a place to which to return. To establish such a zone, American military officials estimate, would require not only U.S. air power but ground forces numbering up to 30,000. Once the safe zone was established, many of those troops could be replaced by forces from Europe, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, but the initial force would have to be largely American.
In addition, a further 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops would be required to uproot Islamic State from the haven it has created in Syria and to help local forces uproot it in Iraq. Many of those troops could then be replaced by NATO and other international forces to hold the territory and provide a safe zone for rebuilding the areas shattered by Islamic State rule.
At the same time, an internationally negotiated and blessed process of transition in Syria should take place, ushering the bloodstained Mr. Assad from power and establishing a new provisional government to hold nationwide elections. The heretofore immovable Mr. Assad would face an entirely new set of military facts on the ground, with the Syrian opposition now backed by U.S. forces and air power, the Syrian air force grounded and Russian bombing halted. Throughout the transition period, and probably beyond even the first rounds of elections, an international peacekeeping force—made up of French, Turkish, American and other NATO forces as well as Arab troops—would have to remain in Syria until a reasonable level of stability, security and inter-sectarian trust was achieved.
And, just so you’re sure who’s side he’s on:
Not today. Americans remain paralyzed by Iraq, Republicans almost as much as Democrats, and Mr. Obama is both the political beneficiary and the living symbol of this paralysis. Whether he has the desire or capacity to adjust to changing circumstances is an open question. Other presidents have—from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton—each of whom was forced to recalibrate what the loss or fracturing of Europe would mean to American interests. In Mr. Obama’s case, however, such a late-in-the-game recalculation seems less likely. He may be the first president since the end of World War II who simply doesn’t care what happens to Europe.
This is unacceptable. Will we now invite every Republican that supports Hillary to raise funds in her name while bashing our President? And will Hillary’s attempt to “persuade and educate” the American people about the necessity of military intervention in our new world order occur before or after November 4th?