Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator — The Foreign Policy Initiative — with a half-day conference on “the path to success in Afghanistan” (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that “the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan” almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force. Senor, who has stayed relatively under the radar, served as Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman in Iraq under L. Paul Bremer. But as the New Yorker’s George Packer noted, Senor “slowly lost his credibility in the daily press briefings he gave…during the first year of the occupation of Baghdad.” In its initial focus on the war in Afghanistan, FPI chose heavy representation of Iraq war advocates for its panelists and guest speakers. As the Wonk Room’s Matt Duss recently wrote, “a far better title” for FPI’s maiden voyage would be “Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage.”

From The Progress Report