[Marxism] Kettle of hawks

[Louis Proyect]

Counterpunch, December 2, 2008
Not One Anti-War Voice
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

By JEREMY SCAHILL

Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign 
policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the 
potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and 
Bill Clinton's network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play 
out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between 
Obama's staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US 
foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.

When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: "I didn't 
go around checking their voter registration." That is a bit hard to 
believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. 
But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth 
is that he liked what he saw.

The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden 
is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq 
war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a 
worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from 
George HW Bush's time in office to the present.

Obama has dismissed suggestions that the public records of his 
appointees bear much relevance to future policy. "Understand where the 
vision for change comes from, first and foremost," Obama said. "It comes 
from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are 
going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing." It is a 
line the president-elect's defenders echo often. The reality, though, is 
that their records do matter.

We were told repeatedly during the campaign that Obama was right on the 
premiere foreign policy issue of our day – the Iraq war. "Six years ago, 
I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky 
to do so," Obama said in his September debate against John McCain. 
"Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment." What 
does it say that, with 130 members of the House and 23 in the Senate who 
voted against the war, Obama chooses to hire Democrats who made the same 
judgment as Bush and McCain?

On Iraq, the issue that the Obama campaign described as "the most 
critical foreign policy judgment of our generation", Biden and Clinton 
not only supported the invasion, but pushed the Bush administration's 
propaganda and lies about Iraqi WMDs and fictitious connections to 
al-Qaida. Clinton and Obama's hawkish, pro-Israel chief of staff, Rahm 
Emanuel, still refuse to renounce their votes in favour of the war. 
Rice, who claims she opposed the Iraq war, didn't hold elected office 
and was not confronted with voting for or against it. But she did 
publicly promote the myth of Iraq's possession of WMDs, saying in the 
lead up to the war that the "major threat" must "be dealt with 
forcefully". Rice has also been hawkish on Darfur, calling for 
"strik[ing] Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets".

It is also deeply telling that, of his own free will, Obama selected 
President Bush's choice for defence secretary, a man with a very 
disturbing and lengthy history at the CIA during the cold war, as his 
own. While General James Jones, Obama's nominee for national security 
adviser, reportedly opposed the Iraq invasion and is said to have stood 
up to the neocons in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, he did not do so 
publicly when it would have carried weight. Time magazine described him 
as "the man who led the Marines during the run-up to the war – and 
failed to publicly criticise the operation's flawed planning". Moreover, 
Jones, who is a friend of McCain's, has said a timetable for Iraq 
withdrawal, "would be against our national interest".

But the problem with Obama's appointments is hardly just a matter of bad 
vision on Iraq. What ultimately ties Obama's team together is their 
unified support for the classic US foreign policy recipe: the hidden 
hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of US militarism to 
defend the America First doctrine.

Obama's starry-eyed defenders have tried to downplay the importance of 
his cabinet selections, saying Obama will call the shots, but the ruling 
elite in this country see it for what it is. Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain", 
called Obama's cabinet selections, "reassuring", which itself is 
disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign 
staffer Max Boot summed it up best. "I am gobsmacked by these 
appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a 
President McCain," Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the 
retention of Gates at defence "all but puts an end to the 16-month 
timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with 
dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign."

Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a "powerful" voice "for 
'neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 
'neoconservativism.'" Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The 
Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, 
that he sees "certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how 
Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to 
continue the course set by Bush in his second term."

There is not a single, solid anti-war voice in the upper echelons of the 
Obama foreign policy apparatus. And this is the point: Obama is not 
going to fundamentally change US foreign policy. He is a status quo 
Democrat. And that is why the mono-partisan Washington insiders are 
gushing over Obama's new team. At the same time, it is also disingenuous 
to act as though Obama is engaging in some epic betrayal. Of course 
these appointments contradict his campaign rhetoric of change. But move 
past the speeches and Obama's selections are very much in sync with his 
record and the foreign policy vision he articulated on the campaign 
trail, from his pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan to his 
"residual force" plan in Iraq to his vow to use unilateral force in 
Pakistan to defend US interests to his posturing on Iran. "I will always 
keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security 
and our ally Israel," Obama said in his famed speech at the American 
Israel Public Affairs Committee last summer. "Sometimes, there are no 
alternatives to confrontation."

Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama 
administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's 
presidencies. He is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's 
Most Powerful Mercenary Army.