Neocon military genius Fred Kagan on Monday: "The civil war in Iraq is over"

Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com

The American Enterprise Institute held an event on Monday entitled "Iraq: The Way Ahead." They convened a panel as diverse as the ones typically convened among the Beltway establishment to talk about Iraq. It featured war cheerleader genius Fred Kagan of the AEI and war cheerleader geniuses Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution (the always in-sync, pro-war AEI and Brookings are, along with the Council on Foreign Relations, the most quoted and most-cited "think tanks" in the American media).

To commence the discussion to show us all "The Way Ahead" in Iraq, here is the very first thing that Fred Kagan said:

The first thing I want to say is that: The Civil War in Iraq is over. And until the American domestic political debate catches up with that fact, we are going to have a very hard time discussing Iraq on the basis of reality.

One has to watch the video to fully appreciate how pompously he sits there on his war throne issuing his decree about "reality" in Iraq.

Less than 24 hours after Kagan decreed the Civil War in Iraq over -- and lectured Americans that we must accept this if we are to understand reality in Iraq -- McClatchy News Service reported:

With Iraq's top leaders directing the battle, Iraq's army and national police pressed a major operation Tuesday to wrest control of the southern port city of Basra from the Shiite Mahdi Army militia. Fighting between government forces and the militia quickly spread through Iraq's south and into Baghdad.

(Continued here.)