An Army of Kagans

While The Weekly Standard has to make do with using Frederick Kagan's wife to write articles proclaiming the Kagan surge plan a success, The Washington Post believes in integrity and trots out brother Robert Kagan to do it instead. Maybe someday we can get Donald Kagan's take on all this. If only the whole world were made up of members of the Kagan family, then maybe George W. Bush would be a really popular president.

At any rate, you're not supposed to mention Robert Kagan in polite professional punditry circles without observing that he's much smarter and a much more honest writer than your average neocon. This pearl of wisdom even has the virtue of being true. Sadly, as Glenn Greenwald exhaustively demonstrates, this really isn't saying very much. For a neocon, he has a great analytic track record on Iraq, which means his track record is horrible rather than, say, horrifyingly horrible. That he gets to slander his employers at the Post in the first graf of his terrible column merely demonstrates how nice it must be to be a conservative . . . well-worked refs are the best refs to have.