A 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."

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.