Obama's Foreign Policy: The Case for Pessimism
His appointments augur ill
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
DIGG THIS
 We
know the sellout is a reality when we listen to Jamie Kirchick
praise Barack Obama's national security appointments: "Barack
Obama isn't even president yet, and he's already angering some of
his most devoted followers on the party's left wing. This is the
mark of what could be a very successful presidency," he snarks.
Kirchick,
in his
role as Marty
Peretz's alter ego, is pleased as punch with the incoming Obama-ites,
who appear to have abandoned
their "netroots"
early on and ceded
the foreign policy realm to the pro-war Clinton wing of the party.
He is mostly concerned with gloating over the fact that Joe Lieberman
wasn't
expelled from the Democratic caucus, but the larger issue is
the party's foreign policy stance in general, which looks to be
shaping up as distinctly right-of-center. ("Right," in
this sense, means neocon,
rather than authentically
conservative, but then you knew that.)
As the last
surviving representative of the Scoop
Jackson Democrats, who have long been on the politically endangered
species list, Lieberman has a special place in the hearts of neocons
everywhere, but especially in the editorial offices of The New
Republic, which, in spite of unconvincing efforts to suck up
to the "new politics" wing, exists to hold high the banner
of that hoary tradition.
 Obama's
personal
intervention on Lieberman's behalf hints at where the Democrats
are going as a governing party, and his appointments are rapidly
confirming this trend: not only Hillary
Clinton at State and Robert
Gates at Defense, but also retired Marine Gen. Jim
Jones as national security adviser. The former commander of
U.S. forces in Europe and military head of NATO was described
last year as a political "hot commodity" by the Wall
Street Journal. In a piece that detailed the courting of the
general by both political parties, Hillary is cited as saying she'd
put him in her Cabinet, perhaps as defense secretary, although her
campaign qualified this by saying that "it's way premature"
to speculate about such matters, as indeed it was. Jones is best
buddies
with John McCain, and, although he assiduously avoided a formal
endorsement, he made an appearance with his old friend during the
campaign. When Jones served on a commission evaluating our military
operations in Iraq, he concluded that we ought to stay the course:
"Understand the fact that regardless how you got there, there is
a strategic price of enormous consequence for failure in Iraq."
His point of agreement with President-elect Obama is that he believes
we've been grievously amiss in not escalating
the fighting on the Afghan front sooner.
The argument
for Gen. Jones as national security chieftain echoes the case for
Hillary at State: "If Obama engages Iran," avers
The New Republic, "it'll be harder to dismiss his overtures
as soft-headed or naïve with Jones coordinating foreign policy."
The same malarkey is being uttered with a straight face by defenders
of the Clinton appointment, such as Obamacon-in-chief Andrew
Sullivan, who claim it will somehow give Obama the credibility
to pull off a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This
assumes, however, that his "team
of rivals," as the pundits have deemed it, won't mutiny.
It assumes presidential omnipotence, when the reality is that without
the cooperation of the vast and powerful national
security bureaucracy, the White House will find it difficult
to carry out its program. It also assumes Clinton and her menagerie
won't actively sabotage the policies she attacked
during the primaries as "naïve" and "dangerous."
Read
the rest of the article
November
25, 2008
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2008 Antiwar.com
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