[R-G] Hawks Behind the Dove: Who Makes Obama’s Foreign Policy?

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.progressive.org/mag/shorrock0708

Hawks Behind the Dove: Who Makes Obama’s Foreign Policy?
By Tim Shorrock, July 2008 Issue

Cuba’s dramatic announcement last February that Fidel Castro was  
stepping down as head of the Cuban government presented Barack Obama  
with an unprecedented opportunity to establish his foreign policy  
credentials and set himself apart from Hillary Clinton, as well as the  
Bush Administration and its heir-apparent, John McCain.

It should have been an easy shot: President Bush said U.S. policy  
toward Cuba, particularly the longstanding U.S. embargo, would not  
change one iota until “free and fair elections” were held in Cuba and  
the country had embraced his vision of democracy. McCain quickly  
echoed Bush’s Cold War declaration, which basically amounts to a call  
for regime change in Havana.

Clinton, asked during a debate if she would be willing to sit down  
with Raul Castro, Fidel’s successor, replied in similar language. Not  
“without some evidence that [Cuba] will demonstrate the kind of  
progress that is in our interest,” she said, pointing out later  
through a spokesperson that she “supports the embargo and our current  
policy toward Cuba.”

Obama, true to his pledge to change the U.S. approach to the world,  
said he would meet with Cuban leaders “without preconditions” because  
it’s important for the United States “not just to talk to its friends  
but also to talk to its enemies.” Despite calls from some of his  
advisers for America to trade with Cuba just as it does with China and  
Vietnam, however, Obama has been silent on lifting the embargo, though  
he has called for getting rid of restrictions on remittances and  
family travel to that country.

More recently, Obama has completely abandoned the skepticism about the  
embargo he expressed during his 2004 run for the Senate. In a May 23  
speech to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami, he flatly  
declared that, as President, he will “maintain the embargo. It  
provides us with the leverage to present the regime with a clear  
choice: If you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with  
the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin  
normalizing relations.” The declaration drew cheers from the  
virulently anti-Castro crowd.

With Cuba, therefore, we have the basic outline of the foreign policy  
debate of 2008: more of the same from the Republicans, a generally  
hawkish approach from Clinton, and a nuanced stance from Obama that  
underscores his differences with both Clinton and McCain while  
demonstrating his fealty towards U.S. national security interests and  
the Democratic foreign policy mainstream.

These differences show up also on Iran.

When Clinton vowed to “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel  
with nuclear weapons, Obama sharply criticized her comment, saying  
that’s “not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language  
reflective of George Bush.”

While Clinton’s team talked recklessly of brandishing nuclear weapons,  
Obama endorsed proposals to eliminate nukes, and flatly ruled out the  
use of tactical nuclear weapons against terrorist groups in Pakistan  
and Afghanistan (eliciting a warning from Clinton that Presidents  
should refrain from publicly discussing “the use and nonuse of nuclear  
weapons”).

Now that Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, predicting what  
his actual policies will look like requires a careful look at the  
people he relies on for advice on foreign policy.

Obama’s most important foreign policy adviser is Zbigniew Brzezinski,  
who was the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from  
1977 to 1981. In that role, he backed Carter’s aid to the brutal  
Indonesian government in East Timor, and he infamously pushed for  
funding the jihadist rebels in Afghanistan against the Soviets. But  
his hawkish views have mellowed over time. Last August, Brzezinski  
endorsed Obama and blasted Clinton’s foreign policy approach as “very  
conventional.” In contrast to Clinton’s advisers, who speak wistfully  
about Iraq as a policy gone wrong, Brzezinski denounces the war in  
unequivocal terms. Writing in The Washington Post in March 2008, he  
called the war a “national tragedy, an economic catastrophe, a  
regional disaster and a global boomerang for the United States,” and  
argued that it was “started deliberately, justified demagogically, and  
waged badly.”

Obama also relies for advice on Tony Lake, who was Bill Clinton’s  
national security adviser, and Susan Rice, a former assistant  
secretary of state for African affairs (she’s been busy lately  
moderating Obama’s stance on Cuba). Obama also listens to Richard  
Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar, and Ivo Daalder,  
a former official in Bill Clinton’s NSC, who heads up Obama’s  
nonproliferation policies.

Leading Obama’s military advisers is retired Air Force General Tony  
McPeak, who backed George Bush in 2000 but began working with Obama  
after meeting him last year. McPeak says he was attracted by Obama’s  
strong opposition to the war in Iraq and his emphasis on diplomacy.  
Speaking last January during a West Coast campaign swing, McPeak said  
Obama would seek to negotiate with Iran, pointing out that, after the  
September 11 attacks, Tehran cooperated with Washington in tracking Al  
Qaeda suspects and donated more than $300 million to post-Taliban  
Afghanistan. The Bush Administration, he said, should have used that  
“constructive back-channel” to open discussions on other issues— 
implying that Obama would seize on such opportunities. Obama, he  
believes, will usher in a new era of foreign policy after the  
disasters of the Bush-Cheney era. “Our country’s international  
standing has been frittered away by people who don’t have the foggiest  
understanding of how the hell the world works,” McPeak told Rolling  
Stone last March. But McPeak has a hard edge. According to the  
journalist Allan Nairn, he oversaw the delivery of advanced fighter  
jets to Suharto in 1991, just after Suharto’s forces had carried out a  
deliberate massacre of anti-Jakarta demonstrators in Dili, East Timor.

One of the key planks of Obama’s foreign policies is his commitment to  
“soft power,” such as foreign economic aid, to expand American  
influence. Last year, he pledged to double U.S. foreign aid by 2012  
and increase “both the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats,  
development experts, and other civilians who can work alongside our  
military.” Advising him on these issues is John Brennan, a thirty-year  
veteran of the CIA who once ran the National Counterterrorism Center.  
Brennan, like many of his former colleagues in the CIA, believes that  
military power must be augmented by intelligence, diplomacy, and  
foreign aid, and in a recent interview with a Washington newsletter  
argued that “there needs to be much more attention paid to those  
upstream factors and conditions that spawn terrorists” (Brennan is now  
the CEO of the Analysis Corporation, the same company that,  
ironically, employed the contract employee who illegally accessed  
Obama’s passport data at the State Department earlier this year).
In some areas, Obama’s national security policies might be closer to  
McCain’s. He has said he would act unilaterally to take out “high- 
value terrorist targets” in Pakistan if Pervez Musharraf failed to  
take action himself. Like McCain, he has also criticized Jimmy Carter  
for meeting with Hamas.

And on trade and economic policy, Obama has two sides as well. He has  
approached Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who has  
critiqued corporate globalization and has estimated the cost of the  
Iraq War at $3 trillion, as a possible White House adviser. (Stiglitz  
returned the favor by declaring his support for Obama and calling the  
candidate’s economic ideas “brilliant.”)

On the other hand, he is also advised by Austan Goolsbee, a University  
of Chicago economist who reportedly told Canadian officials that  
Obama’s critique of NAFTA was “political positioning” and would not  
become official policy in an Obama White House. Although Goolsbee  
denied the reports, in an April interview with U.S. News & World  
Report, he downplayed Obama’s opposition to free trade agreements,  
saying that “as long as I have known Senator Obama, he has believed  
that you can’t build a moat around the country, and that trade overall  
has been good for the economy—but that there have been a lot of people  
left out.” That’s certainly not the denunciation of free trade deals  
that many trade unionists are looking for.

One person to watch is Richard Holbrooke. Bill Clinton’s U.N.  
ambassador, Holbrooke saddled up with Hillary. But ever since he left  
the Carter Administration, he has been widely viewed within the  
Democratic Party as a Secretary of State in-waiting, and he himself  
has strenuously campaigned for the job. If he is elected in November,  
President Obama would come under enormous pressure from both the  
Clinton camp and his Democratic supporters—including John Kerry, who  
relied on Holbrooke during the 2004 campaign—to make him Secretary of  
State.

Holbrooke, however, carries a lot of baggage—some of it pretty  
unsightly. He was a State Department official in Vietnam during the  
1960s, and under President Carter served as assistant secretary of  
state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. During those years, he  
helped provide key assistance to U.S.-backed dictators in South Korea,  
the Philippines, and Indonesia. His constant refrain was the  
preservation of U.S. national security interests in the region. After  
Park Chung Hee, the South Korean dictator, was shot to death in 1979  
after eighteen years of increasingly brutal rule, for example,  
Holbrooke exploded in anger when Christian dissidents protested the  
continuation of martial law. Their actions, he complained in  
declassified documents I obtained in 1996, were making it difficult  
for the United States to avoid “another Iran” in that country.

And like Brzezinski, Holbrooke lent enormous assistance to Suharto’s  
military to put down the Timorese resistance. Among the weapons  
systems sold to Suharto with U.S. support were A-10 Broncos that were  
used to strafe Timorese villages. “If you look at the statistics, from  
1976 to 1978 we massively increased our assistance that made the  
occupation and quelling of the [East Timor] rebellion possible,”  
Edmund McWilliams, a longtime U.S. diplomat who served in Indonesia  
during the Clinton Administration, told me. “To my mind, that was when  
the great bloodletting took place, and it was all done during the  
watch of Richard Holbrooke and Jimmy Carter, the human rights  
President.”

Holbrooke also was hawkish on Iraq and has had harsh words for Iran,  
comparing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler.

Many liberals, including those in the Obama camp, seem to believe that  
Holbrooke has changed his spots and would make an excellent choice as  
America’s top diplomat. Last February, Samantha Power, a professor at  
Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a former Obama  
adviser, spoke at a foreign policy forum in Reno, Nevada. I was in the  
audience, and asked her if Holbrooke would have a place in an Obama  
Administration.

Power, who won a Pulitzer for her book on genocide, was still working  
as Obama’s top foreign policy adviser at that point. She replied that,  
in her opinion, Holbrooke “had evolved” from the 1970s, and regretted  
some of his actions during that period, particularly in the  
Philippines, where he backed Ferdinand Marcos (she didn’t mention  
Korea or Indonesia). Despite his position as a senior adviser to  
Clinton, Power added, Holbrooke would be welcome in an Obama cabinet.  
“We won’t exclude people working for Hillary Clinton,” she said. “Ours  
will be a broad tent.”

While Obama would be the first community organizer in American history  
to become President and promises to bring a dramatic new face to the  
global scene, we may end up with a lot of old faces.

Tim Shorrock has been covering U.S. foreign policy for more than  
twenty-five years. His book on the outsourcing of U.S. intelligence  
operations, “Spies for Hire,” was published in May by Simon & Schuster.