CNN hands over Republican foreign policy debate to neocon cabal | Al Akhbar English
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/gadfly/cnn-hands-over-republican-foreign-policy-debate-neocon-cabal
When Republican primary candidates debate foreign policy issues tonight, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (a former researcher for AIPAC) will mouth questions provided to him by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). While the Heritage Foundation is well known as the outsourced brain of Republicans in Congress and serves as a hothouse for right-wing GOP domestic policies, AEI’s participation in the debate is even more problematic.
The Washington Post pointed out that some of the candidates have close relationships with the think tanks, noting Newt Gingrich’s 12-year-long fellowship at AEI and Mitt Romney’s employment of several former Heritage fellows. “Can the two think tanks divorce themselves from the candidates they are tied to in order to produce an impartial debate?” the Post asked.
But this is the wrong question, or at least not the most salient one. The problem with CNN allowing Heritage and AEI to dictate the questions and content of the GOP debate is that it provides the neocon cabal with a national platform to sell Americans on the need for war with Iran and for continued subsidization of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank. AEI is the nerve center for the neocon cabal; it is where the now-discredited case for invading Iraq was developed.