[R-G] Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks

[Anthony Fenton]

Published on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
Barack 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 judgement 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."
© 2008 Guardian News and Media Limited

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 and is a frequent contributor to The  
Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at  
the Nation Institute.