Matthew Yglesias (October 03, 2007) - Proxies' War (Foreign Policy)

Dan Senor? The dope Faux had on the other night cheering for war with Iran? Oy!!!! Does Senor really think the Mittster has a chance?

Posted by Joe Klein's conscience | October 3, 2007 11:32 AM

Wasn't the current president sold to us on the basis of the impressiveness and maturity of his advisors as well?

Posted by gregor | October 3, 2007 11:44 AM

Dan Senor! His sister has been head of AIPAC's Israel office for 20 years (since she emigrated there). Her husband, Saul Singer, is a far-right Jerusalem Post columnist.

Posted by Jeff Cohen | October 3, 2007 11:48 AM

Rudy Giuliani's list, on the other hand, is completely untempered with the inclusion of any big-name non-crazy people, whereas McCain at least leavens the Kagan/Kristol/Woolsey axis with some Armitage/Eagleburger/Scowcroft counterweights.
Maybe he doesn't count as "big-name", but I thought you had mentioned taking a class with Stephen Rosen and respecting him, Matt.

Posted by Minipundit | October 3, 2007 12:02 PM

Is this what passes for political analysis under The Atlantic marque? "frightening crazy people....big-name non-crazy people....we're probably doomed...definitely doomed"? I agree with them, consequently they have judgment?

Is that how kids write and think these days? Sure, its useful when IMing among the echo chamber, but unsuitable for any kind of learned argument. I expect this on some high school kids little face book page, but The Atlantic? When did it jump the shark?

Posted by Béziers | October 3, 2007 12:35 PM

Re Hilary

If we are to believe Mr. Don Williams, it doesn't make any difference who Ms. Clinton lists as foreign policy advisers. According to Mr. Williams, the only adviser who counts is Mr. Haim Saban.

Posted by SLC | October 3, 2007 12:39 PM

It's hilarious that Matthew talks about the fat-ass, pencil-pushing memo-writters on Giulani's staff as the "crazy people" -- while failing to recognize that Rommey has the only psychotic who can "put the flies crawling across McCain's dead eyeballs". For real.

" (Joseph) Cofer Black, former CIA and State Department counterterrorism official and now vice chairman Blackwater USA, senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security "
--------
Ha ha ha ha.
Of course, some unkind people might argue that Cofer was the one who screwed the pooch in dealing with Al Qaeda while he was a senior spook in CIA's Directorate of Ops a few years back. Director of CIA's Counterterrorist Center on Sept 11, 2001 actually. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cofer_Black

And CIA officer Michael Scheuer used the unkind phrase "headquarters hero" to describe Cofer's White House presentations after Sept 11:

--------------------
MIKE SCHEUER: Cofer Black, who was the Chief of CTC, said, you know, "We're going to put their heads on pikes, and we want flies crossing you know, crawling across their dead eyes," and that kind of headquarters hero talk.

RON SUSKIND: The president loves operational guys. Black does a great presentation. You know, Black has been waiting his whole life for this, basically. He's very theatrical.

COFER BLACK: This is serious business. We've been attacked. This is war. People are going to die. And my guys are going to die.

RON SUSKIND: He can talk the talk of blood lust. You know, he's very vivid. The president loves this."

Ref: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/script.html

Posted by Don Williams | October 3, 2007 12:42 PM

Is this what passes for political analysis under The Atlantic marque? "frightening crazy people....big-name non-crazy people....we're probably doomed...definitely doomed"? I agree with them, consequently they have judgment?

M. Beziers feels we need more Dignity And Seriousness And Respect shown to the Extremely Important Advisers in question. M. Beziers is clearly someone who knows how to show Proper Respect For Duly Constituted Authority.

Posted by James Gary | October 3, 2007 1:03 PM

Re Don Williams

The fact that Mr. Black is an officer in the Blackwater company should, by itself and not knowing anything else about him, give great pause to anybody considering supporting Mr. Romney. The Blackwater company is a haven for far right nutjobs, including its CEO Mr. Prince, devotee of James Dobson, among other scumbags.

Posted by SLC | October 3, 2007 1:03 PM

And Fred Thompson has... nobody?

Posted by right | October 3, 2007 1:13 PM

Beziers, you are aware that you're reading a blog at the Atlantic, and not the actual Atlantic magazine, right? Are you unfamiliar with the concept of blogs?

Posted by mad6798j | October 3, 2007 1:15 PM

Anyone else notice that Gen. Jack Keane, co-crafter of the surge, is one of Clinton's advisers?

Posted by Clark | October 3, 2007 1:25 PM

What, no list for Gravel?

Posted by Glenn | October 3, 2007 1:40 PM

Beziers, the reason why Matt is using high school language--crazy, non-crazy-- to describe the foreign policy teams is because....they ARE exactly that. The choice this election isn't between the lesser of two evils, it's about raging insanity versus real world rationality. And all the Republican candidates, without exception, do appear to be seriously delusional in contrast to the Democrats who are all--even if you can disagree with specific points--speaking in policy terms based on reasoned analysis. I don't know why this is the case, but Matt's language couldn't be more apt and it has to be conveyed as such otherwise we dignify the fulminations of a crew that very clearly has lost it.

Posted by AD | October 3, 2007 2:08 PM

Blogs are permitted quality control. Blogs aren't genetically illiterate, overly-conclusory, insulting screaming matches (which does not describe this post nor Matt generally).

Marques cross pollinate among distribution channels. The Atlantic Monthly Group should be concerned about quality in all of its products.

Other than the link, this particualr post was empty of anything useful and constituted crude labeling.

Posted by Béziers | October 3, 2007 2:12 PM

1) You guys are falling for the media hatchet job that's being done on Blackwater. I personally don't care for mercernary outfits, but Blackwater recruits from the US military (Navy Seals, Special Forces,etc) and those units weed out the mentally ill. Army Special Forces rejected Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, for example.

2) Blackwater guards the State Department in Iraq because Colin Powell was damm well not going to have his people protected by military people under Donald Rumsfeld's command. He could never know when the State Department people would be left unguarded in hostile areas by Rumsfeld playing games.

3) Like Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld is real cocksucker -- who thought that winning his bureaucratic battles for power outweighed winning on the battlefield.

Our strike against Al Qaeda after Sept 11 was delayed for a month because Rumsfeld insisted on being in charge and not supporting the CIA even though the CIA had a detailed plan for attacking Al Qaeda and Rumsfeld did not. See my earlier cite to
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/script.html

4) And the State Department learned early on that it was on its own in Iraq -- because of Rumsfeld's fights in the WHite House with Colin Powell.

When the CPA Hq at Najaf was attacked by 400 Iraqi insurgents in April 2004, it was defended by 8 Blackwater employees and a small Marine unit -- while the US military stood by with their hands up their asses. See
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53059-2004Apr5?language=printer

5) What I'd be interested in is finding out who's feeding this media campaign.

Posted by Don Williams | October 3, 2007 2:23 PM

Re Don Williams

Blackwater was founded by scumbags with far right wing connections.

"The Prince family is deeply connected in conservative politics, especially among religious right groups. Edgar Prince, the patriarch of the family, was close friends with James Dobson and a strong supporter of Focus on the Family, having donated millions to that organization.. He was a founding board member of the Family Research Council before his death in 1995 and his wife still sits on the FRC board as well as on the Focus on the Family board. Both have also served on the board of the Council for National Policy, a secretive group that acts as a sort of religious right steering committee, the Alliance Defense Fund and a variety of other similar organizations.

Erik Prince has spread the wealth around to conservative politicians all over the country, donating more than $200,000 to the Republican National Committee since 1998 and donating to the campaigns of Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum and many other prominent conservative legislators. Perhaps most interesting to Michigan residents, he is a strong supporter of Republican leader and failed gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, whose wife Betsy is Erik's sister. The DeVos family foundations typically support the same religious right groups.

The DeVos and Prince families generally support the same groups and causes. Elsa Prince, Erik's mother, carries on the family tradition of support for religious right issues. She was the single largest contributor, over $75,000, to Citizens for the Protection of Marriage, the group working to pass the anti-gay marriage amendment in 2004. Dick and Betsy DeVos gave $20,000 and Doug and Maria DeVos gave $30,000. The Detroit Free Press reported last year that the Amway owners and their various foundations had given more than $7.5 million to Federal campaigns since 1990, including a $2.5 million donate to the Republican National Committee, the single largest soft money contribution ever. During the 2006 campaign for governor of Michigan, DeVos took time out to go to North Carolina and tour Blackwater's training facilities with a group of Michigan's first responders.

In addition to the many scandals involving Blackwater personnel in shootouts in Iraq, there are also financial scandals. The Nation reported on a government audit of a Blackwater contract with the State Department that found that the company had padded its billing:

A heavily redacted 2005 government audit of Blackwater's WPPS contract proposal, obtained by The Nation, reveals that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs, which would result "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit." The audit also found that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies.

In the buildup to today's hearings, the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform issued a detailed report on Blackwater's activities in Iraq. The picture it paints is not pretty. It includes incidents like this:

Documents provided by the State Department raise serious questions about how State Department officials responded to reports of Blackwater killings of Iraqis. In a high-profile incident in December 2006, a drunken Blackwater contractor killed the guard of Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi. Within 36 hours after the shooting, the State Department had allowed Blackwater to transport the Blackwater contractor out of Iraq. The State Department Charge d'Affaires recommended that Blackwater make a "sizeable payment" and an "apology" to "avoid this whole thing becoming even worse." The Charge d'Affaires suggested a $250,000 payment to the guard's family, but the Department's Diplomatic Security Service said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to "try to get killed." In the end, the State Department and Blackwater agreed on a $15,000 payment."

Posted by SLC | October 3, 2007 2:35 PM

SLC
When you steal material from some source --and don't give a link/credit to that source -- it kinda undercuts your argument about Blackwater padding their accounts.

You appear to be arguing that Edgar Prince gave a few hundred thousand dollars in campaign donations to the Republicans -- and got back a few hundred MILLION in contracts from the US Treasury.

Yep, that's the way it usually works. The Republicans and Democrats both solicited about $300 MILLION each in the last election cycle -- how much of that do you think that came in as $25 checks written by the little people wanting good government??

This account notes that , under Paul Bremer,
"$12 BILLION of cash had been dropped from C-130 planes, using shrinkwrapped pallets of $100 bills.[3] The cash deliveries were described in a memo prepared for the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which concluded that "Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste.... Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents...."
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Provisional_Authority#Audits_of_the_CPA.27s_expenditures_of_Iraqi_funds

ha ha ha. I guess that's one monetary policy for economic stimulus that never occurred to Alan Greenspan.

When government auditors finally showed up in Iraq, Paul Bremer and his staff FLED Iraq via abrupt resignations. Which conveniently relieved them of having to sign audit documents.

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bremer#Early_departure

Posted by Don Williams | October 3, 2007 2:54 PM

Re Don Williams

1. The source was Ed Braytons' blog. I have provided a link to the thread on two other threads on this blog.

2. Mr. Williams totally ignores the association of the Prince family with various extreme right wing organizations such as the Fascist Research Council. Of course, the Prince family is just one of many. For example, Richard Mellon Scaithe, Howard Ahmanson come immediately to mind. Compared to them, Hiam Saban is a pussycat.

Posted by SLC | October 3, 2007 3:20 PM

Blackwater does have one competitive advantage in Washington: They apparently whacked all the witnesses.

7 day Iraqi corpses don't make good witnesses on TV at Waxman's hearings. It's not even the usual Washington game of "he said -she said". It's more like living Blackwater employees with their story versus dead Iraqis with no story.

Posted by Don Williams | October 3, 2007 3:22 PM

I hate how my shrink called me crazy for stabbing all those people who tried to steal my Mighty Cheese of Triumph. How dare they call me crazy! It's so lazy and unintellectual, so unlike my Mighty Cheese.

Posted by Reality Man | October 3, 2007 4:06 PM

Even better than Obama's list of advisors...

...would be if we didn't have to worry about who's advising which Presidential candidate on foreign affairs, because what the President thinks about foreign policy wouldn't be that important. I mean, if we lived in a republic, whose constitution limited the President to faithfully executing the will of the Congress, and it was Congress that was responsible for setting our foreign policy.

Oh wait, that is what our Constitution says...

I know that the conventional wisdom these days tells us that we need the President and his circle of advisors to deal with foreign policy because the Congress will always be too riven by political machinations to arrive at the right decisions in a timely manner, so we need a band of capable technocrats advising the President in confidence to arrive at those right decisions. And that conventional wisdom about the wisdom of leaving our foreign policy to experts, if challenged with the counter-example of this President and his circle of advisors coming up with this epically unwise war in Iraq, will reply that the problem is that this President and this circle of advisors were not wise men, and made bad calls. Therefore, as per this post, it behooves us to scrutinize carefully the circle of foreign policy advisors surrounding Presidential candidates, lest we let into the seat of power another circle jerk of the unwise.

But what if the problem with letting a group of experts, wise or unwise, operating in confidence as Presidential advisors, determine our foreign policy is that this arrangement itself compels unwise decisions? Going to war with Iraq was unwise only in terms of the national interest, but so obviously unwise in those terms that it is difficult to blame even the team of Powell/Rice/Rumsfeld, no matter what you think of their wisdom. Iraq happened because it looked liek they were going to lose the mid-term elections, and Rove decided a little rally-'round-the-Commander-in-Chief action was just the thing to turn an electoral loss into a win. And it worked. Iraq was wise politically. It's political usefulness has since deteriorated, but it is unclear that they are worse off now in the poll numbers than the trend was taking them before 9/11. Their political team is looking for a (politically) better replacement war, and they seem to think they have a winner in Iran.

The hope is, when we remove foreign policy decisions from the messy public forum of Congress, and behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, that the privacy will allow the technocrats the freedom of maneuver to get this country the best possible foreign policy. The reality is that letting the President and his team handle foreign policy on their own means that they will use it for political advantage.

It doesn't matter which foreign policy team is smarter. If we don't have the consensus that can only be achieved by having Congress hammer out our foreign in public, however messy and usually stifling of any action the results may be, the availability for distortion to meet private political needs will always make a foreign policy arrived at in private by the President's men, national interest stupid and political advantage smart.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | October 3, 2007 5:21 PM

In the fruitcake that's today's Republican party, nuts are everywhere. But Rudy has the most nuts that can garner the A.E.I., Neo-Con seal of approval.

Posted by bbbustard | October 3, 2007 7:49 PM

Re Glen Tomkins' comment "I know that the conventional wisdom these days tells us that we need the President and his circle of advisors to deal with foreign policy because the Congress will always be too riven by political machinations to arrive at the right decisions in a timely manner, so we need a band of capable technocrats advising the President in confidence to arrive at those right decisions "
---------
Actually, its because our billionaire overlords only want one person to bribe and one puppet to call. Making multiple phone calls to Congress was becoming tedious and is no way to run a global empire. Julius Caesar reached the same conclusion about 2000 years ago.

Plus, sometimes the crooked little fuckers in Congress didn't stay bought if someone came in with a better offer. This way, foreign policy can be decided by a .. er.. silent auction.

That's the real purpose behind all those Weekly Standard columns, Meet the Press interviews, Washington Post Opeds,etc.

Not to have a debate but to pass signals.

A little more discreet than having the players make hand signals or hold up wooden paddles at Sothebys.

Plus, the billionaires get a hoot out of watching all the retarded common people take the Washington DC Kabuki dance seriously.

Read Plato's "Republic" for Socrates' discussion of the prisoners in the cave.

As an aspiring philosopher, Matthew should have already read it but he had the misfortune to go to Harvard.

Posted by Don Williams | October 3, 2007 8:10 PM

Has anybody noticed that Vali Nasr is listed as a Clinton Middle East adviser? Having someone with real expertise in Shia Islam and Iranian politics might be fairly useful in an Administration, for change.

Posted by Ben F | October 3, 2007 9:55 PM

2) Blackwater guards the State Department in Iraq because Colin Powell was damm well not going to have his people protected by military people under Donald Rumsfeld's command. He could never know when the State Department people would be left unguarded in hostile areas by Rumsfeld playing games.

This is an interesting interpretation. I thought we went with mercenaries because we didn't have enough troops.

Posted by Steve J. | October 4, 2007 2:58 AM

Armitage is acceptable to you? I thought you were one of the "its treason to out a CIA agent" people -- and it was Armitage, not Libby, who outed Plame.

I guess you really didn't care about that -- just wanted to ping an administration you hate.

Posted by Rhymes With Right | October 4, 2007 11:18 AM

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