If you're a devoted C-Span viewer like me, you've witnessed a blurrying parade of people named Kagan stomp across your screens the past few years. They show up at endless forums sponsored by neocon front groups like the American Enterprise Institute. Their Wall Street Journal op-eds are read on the Washington Journal morning call-in show. And at this point, network founder Brian Lamb has hosted the entire brood on his Sunday night Q&A interview show.

And since I started learning about them, I have to confess to the guilty pleasure of never missing an appearance. I see the name Kagan on the schedule, and I set aside the time. I like horror movies, and I like the Kagans. 

Donald (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kagan) is the scion of the family. If the Kagans were the model for Father Knows Best, Donald would be Robert Young. An immigrant from Lithuania, Donald is a professor of history at Yale and has a distinguished academic pedigree. Among the books he has authored over the past 40 years are The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, The Archimadean War, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, and The Peloponnesian War. Books that don't have the word "war" in the title include The Fall of the Athenian Empire (I think there was a war involved in that), and While America Sleeps, a clarion call to increase spending for war, co-written with son Frederick.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Donald's "Origins of War" course is one of the most popular at Yale, and his seminars focus on topics like Thucydides (war) and Spartan Hegemony (more war).

Oh yes -- he was also a member of the justly notorious Project for a New American Century, the geniuses who first decided it would be a good idea to send our army charging into Iraq. But for the most part, Donald restricts his fascination with slaughter to events of 2,000 years ago. Unfortunately, he reproduced.

Donald's elder son is Robert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kagan), a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but don't let that fool you. Just a little Orwellian doublespeak, be assured -- Robert has warmongering credentials with the best of them. Robert began his career working for Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz, a period he later celebrated with his first book -- A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990 (note to Daniel Ortega: This guy's still out there). He took to bullying small countries early, so it's no surprise to discover he was not just a member, but actually co-founder of -- guess -- The Project for a New American Century, the geniuses who, etc., etc.

Robert co-edited a book on geo-politics with William "Wrong About Everything, Every Single Time" Kristol, and he's a contributing editor for both the Weekly Standard and the New Republic. So he promotes war on both sides of the aisle and, he'll have you know, he's no longer content with the small stuff. His monthly Washington Post columns have recently warned us against going soft on Russia and China. Oh boy. I guess he's sort of a proselytizer of war -- taking it where it hasn't been before.

Robert's wife is Victoria Nuland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland). She is a career foreign service officer and currently our ambassador to NATO, but lest you think that makes her a responsible member of society, here's some reassuring news. Until May 2005, she was Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. That's right -- Scooter Libby's #2, and the May 2005 date is significant, for it was then that Cheney famously said the Iraqi insurgency was in its "last throes." Bravo, Victoria. Such wise advice.

But in the "failing upward" tradition of the Bush administration, Victoria was then dispatched to NATO, where her duties include managing the expansion of the alliance to the borders of Russia -- how's that going? -- and pulling teeth from our European allies to send to Afghanistan, hopefully with permission to use their guns. But like all the Kagans, she can't keep her pen silent, so she recently wrote a piece for the Post putting the best face she could on the forgotten fiasco, Afghanistan.

Which made me think, "But why should we be called to defend out security and values so far from home. Isn't that a bit like doing drive-by shootings in the ghetto to keep my house in the suburbs from being broken into?" But that's bringing common sense into the discussion, and that's not fair. We're dealing with neocons here.

But it's younger brother Frederick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Kagan) who's most in the news these days. He's considered the "intellectual architect" of the Surge, the war-fighting strategy which has brought such peace to Iraq. Frederick is a resident scholar at AEI where he moderates such forums as "Iraq's Economic Surge" -- oops, that one was cancelled.

But I did watch one of his recent AEI events on C-Span, a Surge progress report featuring fellow infamous war cheerleaders Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack. Let me tell you, the boys of Monty Python used to get some hilarious sketches out of unflappable self-assuredness carried to such absurd extremes. The forum occurred just after the 4,000th American GI died in Iraq -- a milestone which went unmentioned -- and they assured the AEI bobbleheads that catastrophe was sure to ensue if their advice was not followed (as opposed to what happens when their advice is followed).

The whole time I was thinking, "God, I'd like to see one of these murderers in a helmet," but then I looked at Frederick and realized that was kind of ridiculous. Let's just say physical exertion is not his forte. He takes the description "armchair general" to heart. (Still, the other two . . .)

Before anyone important (meaning George Bush) actually started listening to him, Frederick's fairly harmless academic specialties were Napoleon and Russian military history. Napoleon, Russia . . . Is it starting to make sense now? And, oh yes, he was a member of the Project for a New American Century, the geniuses who etc., etc.

But Frederick also took a wife, and she's my most favorite Kagan of them all -- Kimberly. She was the last of the clan to be granted an audience with Brian Lamb, and she won my heart. As those who watch his interviews very often know, Lamb likes to delve into the personal -- what part of the house do you write in, and what time of day, and always questions about the family. Sometimes it's revealing, and that was how I learned the Kagans are all big New York Yankees fans, and the conversation at family get-togethers frequently turns to debates about the strengths and weaknesses of their favorite players.

I found this reassuring. It means if I was ever invited to dinner with the Kagans, there would be at least part of the conversation I did not find nauseating. Don't get me wrong -- I hate the Yankees, but not like I hate war, so I should be able to keep at least a few bites down.

But this is obviously a competitive family, and Kimberly, as the newcomer, apparently felt it necessary to dive into the family business whole-hog, no-holds-barred. So she founded her own think tank -- the Institute for the Study of War (http://understandingwar.org/). When I first looked at the website a few months ago, it seemed to be nothing more than her and some Young Republican interns. But she's beefed it up since then, adding a retired military intelligence officer (I feel an oxymoron joke coming on) and a Texas A&M Aggie -- as a former resident of Austin, the home of the University of Texas, I sneer in his general direction. The interns are still around -- Georgetown University seems to be a good place to troll for such dregs, although she also had a recent contributor from Ohio State in my hometown of Columbus. I'll be carrying a silver cross from now on, just in case.

Kimberly has lately been sharing the fruits of her studies on the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120718691572085211.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries), the latest titled, "The Second Iran-Iraq War" (one is never enough for a Kagan). I read it carefully, twice, searching for a single paragraph that did not contain a lie, and was about to do so a third time when I realized, "Wait a minute. This is the Wall Street Journal editorial page. If it wasn't full of lies, it wouldn't be here."

These people are a plague. But at least during the Middle Ages, they had the sense to put the so afflicted into quarantine. The Kagans are still running loose, and the toll of the innocent dead is now estimated at somewhere between 100,000 and over one million. But they're only Arabs, so who's counting?

It's worth noting that none of the Kagan biographies say a word about any of them actually serving in the military or facing the horrors of war. No, they love their wars, but from a safe distance. Washington, Brussels, and New Haven are perfectly good places to fight wars from, as far as they're concerned. Still, I bet at least one of them is a "gamer," spending spare time painting little toy soldiers in historically-authentic styles. And to this unknown Kagan, I merely say, "Take up model railroading. Please."

There's a wonderful satirical play waiting to be written about a Kagan family Christmas (I know, they're Jewish, but grant me some dramatic license). They would debate the relative merits of A-Rod and Derek Jeter, and the elder Kagan would entertain with remembrances of Joe DiMaggio, and then they would oh-so-politely and eruditely and with extreme good humor discuss their academic theories which have bankrupted the country and led to such savage destruction and so much death.

It would have to be Theater of the Absurd -- something like the nonsense plays of Eugene Ionesco, or maybe Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, where the protagonist at 69 reflects on a tape recording he made at 39, itself a reflection on his life at still younger ages. "Each can see clearly the fool he was," as one reviewer wrote, "but only time will reveal what kind of fool he has become."