This may illuminate, for those who have been confused, what the true role of DC’s major think tanks is:
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, concerned by his portrayal in U.S. media as an autocratic leader intent on consolidating power, has invited several influential Washington scholars to Baghdad to meet his team next week.
The rare invitation was extended to Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institution and Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group, Reuters has learned.
Pollack, by the way, is a former CIA military analyst who served in President Bill Clinton’s White House and Pletka was an advisor to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1992 until 2002. That’s the kind of revolving door these major think tanks operate in. So while Obama is largely mum about both Maliki’s emerging dictatorship and Washington’s support for that regime’s brutality, Maliki is using leading voices from leading think tanks to counter all the bad news being written up about him. Maliki apparently trusts them to improve his image.
