These two blog posts about the AEI,
- Steve Clemons, Norman Ornstein's AEI/Neocon Problem
- Mark Schmitt's My Life Among the Neo-Cons
are really interesting, and the howls in the comments to them are even more so.
Both are mainstream partial defenses of the AEI-as-it-was (an anti-Brookings) and to a very much more limited extent as it is — a think tank in the tank to donors, overrun with neo-con supports of draconian social policies and extremist militarist aggression eerily reminiscent of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, which nonetheless remains a home to a few policy people who don't live on a full-time diet of Kool-Aid.
In the comments, some people agree that the AEI deserves props for lingering broad-mindedness (and the lingerers don't deserve guilt by association); others say that conditions have reached a point where guilt by association is appropriate; still others attack the very idea of policy 'analysis' that isn't willing or able to subject itself to peer review, there's debate as to whether a think-tank is more effective if it's centrist and nuanced, or extreme and rabid, and so on …. All in all, something to read.
I thought it was the Japanese Army that housed the hardline militarists. The Navy was pessimistic and generally opposed the Pearl Harbour strike, though it carried it out.
You know, as I wrote that, I was worrying that I had it backwards, so you may well be right. (But wasn’t it the Navy who were desperate to secure bases to secure their oil supply?)