The Aspen Strategy Group is a group of neocon gas bags from both parties, and Hillary Clinton will get a substantial portion of her military and foreign policy brain trust from it. How David Stockman gets an invitation, given the way he skewers them, is something he does not disclose. From Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
First there was a “debate” about whether ISIS should be “contained” or “defeated”. That was followed by a glowing progress report from General John Allen. He was President Obama’s Special Envoy for the Global Coalition of the Unwilling and Unable (to fight ISIS), and the gist of his speech was that 6,000 airstrikes since the previous August had been winning droves of hearts and minds in the Upper Euphrates valley.
Well, that number is up to 11,000 now, and there is scant sign of hearts and minds being won.
Still, General Allen’s speech was all for the edification of the pooh bahs of the foreign policy establishment who had been in town for the annual Aspen Strategy Group conclave. The latter bills itself as “a bipartisan foreign policy group that includes legislators, experts, journalists, policy practitioners, members of academia, and business leaders”.
No it’s not. It’s an off-campus exercise in mendacity, vapid group-think and narcissistic self-glorification by the perpetrators of Washington’s endless foreign policy catastrophes. Once a year they come to admire each other and split hairs about pointless tactical differences.
The debate about “containing” versus “defeating” ISIS proved that in spades. In fact, the “exterminate ISIS” team embodied an exact caricature of the bipartisan folly which has congealed in the Washington War Party.
Not surprisingly the #2 chair in the duo was occupied by an-out-and-out neocon warmonger, Professor Phillip Zelikow. He was an architect of the Bush wars on WMD and head of the 9/11 Whitewash Commission. His case boiled down to shouting vehemently that the Islamic hordes are heading for Times Square.
So America needs to obliterate the 200,000 citizens of Raqqa, Syria before they get us. Never mind that there is not one iota of evidence that the self-appointed enforcers of Islamic purity who occupy a few dusty desert towns in the Upper Euphrates have any real capacity to mount a military attack on the fleshpots of Broadway and 42nd.
But the neocons are taking no chances. To nearly every last armchair warrior, led by Robert Kagen, they are lining-up behind Hillary.
Apparently, they fear Trump might make a deal with Putin to unleash President Assad and his Shiite crescent allies. In short order that would put the Islamic State out of business and close the Syrian theatre of neocon war games, too.
But what was dispositive about last summer’s confab was that the #1 chair on the perpetual war team was occupied by Michele Flournoy.
That’s right. She was Obama’s #2 at DOD and was ostensibly a legatee of what was once the Democratic Party’s left-leaning peace wing.
No more. Ms. Flournoy has climbed Washington’s slippery pole of power by growing a heavy plume of hawkish feathers.
Accordingly, she presented not a single coherent argument about how ISIS is a military threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE or Springfield MA. Her case amounted to nothing more than a glib recitation of ISIS’ murderous brutalities, beheadings and benighted barbarisms.
But as John Quincy Adams so profoundly observed, America’s security does not require that it search the world for monsters to destroy.
To continue reading: Trumped! (Part 5. The Aspen Strategy Group—-Hillary’s War Party In Waiting)
