The Advisor Gap

Ari Berman takes a good long luck at the different groups of foreign policy advisors around Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If you read the piece, you may find yourself frustrated that it doesn't come to a more clear-cut conclusion. My experience trying to explore this same issue, though, is that it's simply very difficult to reach a clear-cut conclusion as there's a good deal of overlap. That said, insofar as there are indications of daylight between Clinton and Obama, the daylight certainly seems to be in Obama's favor:

Today, advisers like Tony Lake point to a number of "significant differences" between Obama and Clinton. On Iraq, Obama not only opposed the war but has said he would withdraw all combat troops within sixteen months of taking office. On Iran, Obama rejected the Kyl-Lieberman resolution (though he missed the vote while campaigning) and has proposed a broader engagement strategy to lure Iran into the community of nations. On nuclear weapons, he has not only promised to reduce US nuclear stockpiles, as has Clinton, but advocates a world free of nuclear weapons. On Cuba, Obama went to Miami and said the ban on family travel and remittances to the island nation should be lifted, a policy Clinton opposes.

At any rate, you really ought to read the whole piece because there are a lot of nuances here. What's more, assembling a "foreign policy team" for campaign purposes isn't really the same as assembling an actual foreign policy team to govern with, so it's a bit uncertain how much any of this matters.

Comments

More interesting is how much an advisory team surrounding a president actually controls the nation's foreign policies. Bush is certainly too intellectually lazy and addled to bear responsibility for much of what we've done. His team has likely instigated everything that's happened. Would Obama or Clinton control their advisors or end up with the ring in their nose?

Posted by steve duncan | January 7, 2008 12:59 PM

Re Iran

The wages of appeasement may be seen in the US Navys' response to harassment by Iranian torpedo boats. Every goddamn one of those boats should have been sunk and the ragheads manning them sent to Eavy Jones locker.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/washington/08military.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Posted by SLC | January 7, 2008 1:03 PM

Obama's advisers always looked pretty establishment to me, but they didn't count the most hawkish of Democratic Iraq (and general MidEast hawk) war supporters.

Posted by El Cid | January 7, 2008 1:08 PM

Obama's having Samantha Power on board is an obvious plus. She represents a new generation of thinking on foreign policy issues.

The wages of appeasement may be seen in the US Navys' response to harassment by Iranian torpedo boats.

And the response to the attack on the USS Liberty should have been...? Fuck off, Kahanist.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | January 7, 2008 1:33 PM

Well, given that I'd just earlier slammed Obama for *not* promising a quick and total American withdrawal from Iraq within about a year, I'd have to admit I have a lot of egg on my face.

Or perhaps not so much. I'll admit I haven't been much immersed in the Democratic "horse race"---I'm busy with non-political things---but I do closely read several major papers each day, and I certainly had never realized Obama had made such an apparently ironclad promise of complete and rapid withdrawal.

That leads me to suspect that it's not something he's been making the centerpiece of his campaign, which was my exact original point.

It's one think when Tony Lake says that Obama has said he will quickly withdraw all American troops. It's another thing when Obama himself says something like "If elected, I solemnly promise that every last American soldier will be out of Iraq within sixteen months" and says with major emphasis in every speech he gives.

Posted by RKU | January 7, 2008 2:05 PM

RKU, he's still keeping a small group of troops to protect the embassy. And he wants to have a strike group stationed in Kuwait in case Al Qaeda starts building training camps. No permanent bases but Obama wants to send some of the withdrawing Iraq troops to tamp down on Al Qaeda in Afganistan.

He wants to increase humanitarian efforts by creating "America Houses" to deal with local poverty and provide a secular education to those who want it.

Posted by Abe | January 7, 2008 2:22 PM

"....provide a secular education to those who want it."

Posted by Abe | January 7, 2008 2:22 PM
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I wonder how many troops it would take to build, operate, protect and repair a secular school in Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan. Oh, and escort the students to and from classes and guard their homes round the clock.

Posted by steve duncan | January 7, 2008 2:29 PM

Does Obama really want a world completely free of nuclear weapons?

Lets say the world was free of nuclear weapons during the cold war? Would there have been a massive conventional war in Euope?

If everyone destroys all their nuclear weapons. Doesn't this just give the advantage to the first country to violate the agreement?

Posted by Dave | January 7, 2008 3:19 PM

Obama's position on Cuba was politically forward looking and is largely humanitarian. He supports the right of Cuban Americans to visit their families and send remittances without restictions. This contrasts dramatically with the position of George Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Clinton rejected Obama's position on family travel abd lined up with the harsh Bush limits that were set in 2004, i.e. family visits only once every three years and no exceptions for emergencies.

Ironically Clinton is supporting Bush's policy rather than that of her own husband which provided for annual family visits and a flexible exception for humanitarian reasons.

To date Obama has not gone further. However it is reasonable to hope that he will at least support the other part of Bill Clinton's policy which allowsd non-tourist people to people exchanges.

Obama also has not excluded ending all travel restrictions.

This issue has become particularly important as a symbol of what real change in US foreign policy would look like. It is also one of the easier problems to resolve in that 2/3 of Americans now favor normalization of relations with Cuba.

In addition, no policy isolates the US as much in the Hemisphere and internationally as our unilateral trade and travel embargo of Cuba.

Finally, as Cuba goes through a change in leadership and engages in top to bottom discussion of economic and social reform, it is essential for the US to reinstute non-tourist travel by world affairs councils, students, alumni, professionals, religious and humanitarian organizations, sports and cultural groups, etc.

Posted by John McAuliff | January 7, 2008 4:17 PM

Re pseudonymous in nc

Mr. pseudonymous is obviously totally uninformed about the episode of the USS Liberty. The true story is too long to go into here but suffice it to say that the entire incident was an example of the lack of communication between the CIA and the Navy, much like the Pueblo incident off North Korea. Just another example of what happens when a US Navy ship is commandeered by the CIA and the captain of the ship isn't in command; rather a CIA operative on board is commanding the ship.

Posted by SLC | January 7, 2008 5:25 PM

SLC:

Based on the publicly available knowledge, the US Navy is to be commended for their restraint in the face of such obnoxious and provocative behavior, especially from such inferior forces. I know it's an affront to a tough guy like you that any foreign military, especially if it's composed of Persian "ragheads," should ever assert itself against the US military, even when we have our forces just outside their waters as a (justifiably) intimidating presence. That leverage against Iranian aggression would be useful if we hadn't pissed away the rest of our leverage over there. You're confusing what the British Navy should have done, against much greater aggression, to prevent their abject humiliation a few months back with a professional and balanced response by our own Navy. They had their fingers on the triggers; it takes courage to keep your head and discriminate between a real threat and some bullshit.

Posted by sv | January 7, 2008 6:09 PM

"If everyone destroys all their nuclear weapons. Doesn't this just give the advantage to the first country to violate the agreement?"

Which country do you think has the technology and industrial might - not to mention billions in intelligence services - to detect that violation and immediately overwhelm it with its own capabilities?

Right - the US. Nobody is going to nuke the US by somehow building enough nukes to do the job without the US finding out about it.

SLC: The USS Liberty was - and everyone involved in it or who has studied it knows it was - a deliberate effort by Israel to sink a US ship and deliberately murder the surviving sailors by machine gunning their life rafts. Anybody can spend a minute doing a Google and get the entire story.

You're a fucking liar.

Not to mention that this is off-topic of the thread.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 7, 2008 7:28 PM

"I wonder how many troops it would take to build, operate, protect and repair a secular school in Taliban controlled areas of Afghanistan. Oh, and escort the students to and from classes and guard their homes round the clock.

Posted by steve duncan | January 7, 2008 2:29 PM"

Actually, this was working in Afghanistan for a while (I don't know if it was in Taliban-controlled areas, but it was in areas where the Taliban was violently active). These were the only schools that weren't touched locally. Then Bush abandoned these schools. Why? To send troops to Iraq and because when he does have a decent policy to help others abroad he fucks it up or forgets about it (increasing AIDS foreign aid but implementing a gag rule on family planning and requiring the money be used to by American drugs, the Millenium Challenge Accounts being laughably underfunded).

Posted by Reality Man | January 7, 2008 10:17 PM

I'd mention two things about schools.

1) Afghanistan is not Iraq. Try the same thing in Iraq, and it won't work because US troops are hated more in Iraq than in Afghanistan (not that they're liked in Afghanistan.) But even there, it's unlikely that the insurgents would target the kids. See below.

2) The Taliban won't be killing kids any time soon. Even Islamic fanatics aren't that stupid. They might accidentally kill some in the process of killing US troops, but they won't deliberately target a secular school. The teachers, yes - they'll get shot. The school might be blown up when the kids aren't there. But killing kids is not the way to get your revolution back in power, and the Taliban know that. They'll use fear and terror where they can, but deliberately targeting kids will just turn the Afghans against them.

In any event, it's irrelevant. You can make secular schools anywhere, but the parents and the society will still control the attitudes the children produce.

The only way to reduce the influence of the Taliban in Afghanistan is to improve the overall economy. Hard to do when the country has nothing but opium to sell and it's run by either the Taliban or warlords.

It's simply a non-starter. No amount of "humanitarian work" is going to change the situation in Afghanistan unless you want to pour scores or hundreds of billions into the project and literally drag every Afghan up by his boot heels into the middle class. A billion here or there just isn't going to do squat.

And you have to deal with the corruption. How are you going to do that? Kill everybody who is corrupt? How many does that leave?

Here's a question: has ANYBODY ANYWHERE in history "cleaned up" an entire country - from the outside? I'm not talking about the Marshall Plan. I'm talking about some disaster of a Third World outfit with centuries of history of being screwed up. Any factual examples where this has happened?

I don't think so.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 7, 2008 11:49 PM

Advisors: A Tale of Two Dicks

I also read Ari Berman's article, just for a laugh. Having worked in the Clinton Administration's foreign policy trenches, I shudder looking at the advisors in both camps.

Obama's best advisors are the women: Rice, Butts, and Fox. However all are relatively young and are unlikely to have developed the sharp bureaucratic elbows needed to be effective in the White House or State Department.

His worst are men: Lake and (Richard) Clarke -- one an ineffectual intellectual, the other, bureaucratic evil incarnate.

My favorite description of Lake was by the NYTimes. Lake is pictured next to Bill Clinton and is described as "an unidentified man." I remember a particularly maddening briefing on peacekeeping Lake gave to Democratic Caucus members. Not only was he not convincing, he actually managed to magnify rather than minimize the Members' fear and suspicion of peacekeeping missions. I was surprised he wasn't tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail after that debacle.

Clarke's nickname was Jabba the Hut. Clarke's main skill is political survival. He cannot be eliminated by any of the traditional horror or sci-fi movie means. He will be here after nuclear war, along with the cockroaches. One Clarke 'brainwave' during the early years of the Clinton Administration was to dispatch Peace Corps volunteers to a then chaotic Haiti. Fortunately, this extremely ill-advised initiative was quashed.

On the Clinton side: Berger, Albright and Holbrooke. Humbug!

Berger, a lawyer, is apparently not smart enough to realize that you're better off eating potentially embarassing and/or incriminating classified documents as opposed to stuffing them into your pants in order to get them out of the National Archives. Brings new meaning to the phrase courage of convictions. Berger employed the same approach, "we've got to protect our phoney-baloney jobs" as deputy national security advisor under Tony Lake. Chickened out on a more muscular approach to Haiti that could very well have saved lives and strenghtened democracy.

Holbrooke -- the Sun King -- Monsieur L'Etat C'est Moi. Will take credit for the rising of the sun. Feels he was cheated out of Secretary of State by Albright. Holbrooke was/is the 'brains' behind Clinton's Iraq war resolution vote. Google Holbrooke and Larry Lawrence for insight on Holbrooke's ethics.

Obama has the Evil Dick and HRC has the Big Swinging Dick.

One way out of this . . . er, um, cockfight, would be for both teams to actively solicit the advice and counsel of their current and former House and Senate colleagues.

If I were on Obama's team, I would create an active working group which would include the following:

Senate: Sens. Dodd and Leahy(foreign policy), Reed and Levin (defense) (former Senator) Graham(intelligence)

House: Lantos, Berman, Payne, Obey, Murtha, Dicks, (Barbara) Lee, Fatah, (former Rep.) Rev. Bill Gray

Obviously the list is notional, but such a move could go a long way towards developing a more effective and progressive foreign policy. These Senators, Representatives and their staff have been working key foreign policy issues for donkey's years. It's time to jettison the talking heads and cheap Tom Clancy knockoffs.

Posted by Exiled in Heidiland | January 8, 2008 12:49 AM

Re Richard Steven Hack

Mr. Hack, this blogs favorite bank robber and ex-con, once again demonstrates his total ignorance of the facts of the matter relative to the Liberty incident. His claim that a US ship was knowingly and deliberately attacked by Israeli war planes for the purpose of sinking it is a total pile of crap. This, of course, is the propaganda spread by such illustrious web sites as stormfront and rense, very reliable sources indeed (snark).

1. The Liberty was actually present for the purpose spying on Egyptian communications and relaying the information to Israeli intelligence.

2. Since the Egyptians were in full retreat, the CIA decided to remove the ship from the area, as its information was no longer useful.

3. The Israeli intelligence attache in Washington was informed by his contact at the CIA that the ship would be removed that evening. He so informed his superiors at the Mossad.

4. The CIA neglected to inform the Navy or its contact aboard the Liberty of the decision to exit the battle area. Thus, the order for the exit never reached the captain of the Liberty or the CIA operative aboard.

5. The next day, Israeli pilots spotted a ship off the Sinai coast that was not flying a flag (as per orders from the Navy department) and radioed the information to their headquarters. The IAF was informed by the Mossad that the ship was unknown and was probably a Russian spy ship intercepting Israeli communications, as based on their information, the Liberty was no longer in the area. Therefore, the order was given to attack it.

6. Subsequently, the entire episode was covered up in order that US relations with other Arab states not involved in the war not be harmed (the Egyptians knew full well that the Liberty was spying on their communications but, because of the destruction of nearly all of the Egyptian airforce was unable to do anything about it; in their defense, it is probably unlikely that they would have attacked the ship as the risk of involving the US in the war greatly outweighed any gain to be gotten from sinking it as their forces had already been defeated and were engaged in a disorderly retreat). In the interest or preserving good relations between the Mossad and the CIA, the Government of Israel agreed to go along with the coverup and carry the can for the screwup.

My source for this information was a former colleague of mine who was a professor at a university where I was a research associate. This colleague was originally from Lebanon and had a number of contacts with fellow physicists from Israel and Egypt who were also knowledgeable about their respective countries activities in the 1967 war.

Posted by SLC | January 8, 2008 7:10 AM

SLC's story is utter crap, as every single study of the Liberty incident shows.

His "sources" are who? Unnamed assholes from nowhere.

MY sources - and everyone else's - are the guys who were ON the Liberty and guys who were in the SIGINT intercept rooms listening to the Israeli radio operators. Do a Google - the story is everywhere.

The Liberty was clearly and obviously flying a US flag. It was identified by the Israeli pilots who specifically asked if they should be attacking a US vessel. They were specifically ordered to do so, and specifically ordered not to leave anybody alive.

SLC is a fucking liar Zionist thug who would cover up his mother's murder if it was done by Israel.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | January 8, 2008 9:34 AM

Regarding the "Liberty", wasn't there that published memoir by a senior Israeli government official of the time that has one top official saying to another about the pending attack "But that's deliberate murder, isn't it?"

During that same era, an American ship off the Vietnam Coast was NOT attacked, but some fish made some loud splashing sounds. In retaliation, we bombed Vietnam's cities all to rubble and killed a couple of million Vietnamese.

By contast, the Liberty WAS attacked, killing or wounding a couple of hundred Americans. In retaliation, we massively increased our financial and military support for the attacking government. History is a pretty funny thing.

On the other hand, the books are still open on the debt, and maybe one of these days, America will end up collecting. With interest. Compounded for over forty years. At a usuriously high rate of compounding...

Posted by RKU | January 8, 2008 10:07 AM