AP: Iraq Rebuilding Critic Joins State Dept.

Highlights & Quotes

Eliot Cohen, called by one observer “the most influential neocon in academe,” is a well-known scholar of military affairs based at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which has served as a base for a number of prominent neoconservatives, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Cohen heads SAIS's Center for Strategic Studies, a program founded in 2003 with a generous grant from Philip Merrill, a minor media mogul who heads the U.S. Ex-Im Bank and serves as an adviser to the hawkish Center for Security Policy. Cohen is famous for his thesis that the war on terror constitutes World War IV, and that the Cold War should really be considered World War III. (5)

Cohen has been affiliated with a number of hawkish advocacy groups, including the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the Project for the New American Century. He also serves on the Defense Policy Board, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank, which has been heavily criticized for members’ conflicts of interests and for its stilted ideological profile. (Nearly a third of the board members come from the staunchly conservative Hoover Institution.)

Cohen is the author of Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, 2002, which George W. Bush reportedly read in preparation for the invasion of Iraq; Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War, 1990; and Citizens and Soldiers, 1985. (2)

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