NATIONAL SECURITY MUSINGS….I don’t have a lot of independent comment on this, but here’s a bit of miscellaneous rumormongering on the national security front. First, Joe Klein:
Lots of news from Obamaland on the national security front in the past 24 hours — Hillary Clinton “on track” to become Secretary of State, retired General Jim Jones said to become National Security Adviser (while Republican realist Brent Scowcroft has been advising Obama on National Security)…and some strong flutterings that Obama wants to retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense as first reported here last summer, which seems especially credible because no other name has been floated as a potential SecDef.
If true, this is an extremely strong, and wise, national security team. It would reflect a powerful desire on Obama’s part to return to the tradition of bipartisan foreign policy, with politics stopping at the water’s edge. And it would reflect a growing centrist consensus in the foreign policy/national security spectrum that includes most members of the Bush 41 and Clinton teams — in favor of the primacy of diplomacy over militarism, ready to begin talks with those the Bush Administration considered pariahs (the Taliban, Syria, Iran), but not averse to the use of force — against Al Qaeda, in particular — when necessary.
Hmmm. Here’s Andrew Sullivan on John Brennan:
Marc reports the Republican, former chief-of-staff for George Tenet (who authorized war crimes as CIA head), admirer of Dick Cheney, CEO of the company one of whose contract employees improperly accessed Obama’s and McCain’s passports, and defender of renditions and “enhanced interrogations” is still Obama’s front-runner pick to head the CIA. No, I’m not making this up…..Why is such a man even considered for the post under Obama? This man cannot end the taint of Bush-Cheney. He was Bush-Cheney.
From across the pond, Alex Massie considers Obama’s views more broadly and concludes that we’re not likely to see any dramatic change:
Viewed from outside the United States, the foreign policy “debate” in Washington is a curiously curtailed affair. It concentrates on means, not ends and this rather tends to obscure the fact that, on many and perhaps even most issues, there’s less between the parties than might be thought.
….When you get down to the bottom of it, Obama hasn’t yet given much indication that he either wants to, let alone will, break from the broad thrust of the Washington foreign policy consensus. That being so, why should hawks on either side of the aisle have anything to fear from him? Means matter, of course, but so do ends.
I’m not yet in the mood to make any thundering pronouncements on any of this stuff. None of these people have actually been announced yet, for one thing, and the rumor mill might be wrong. And even if these do turn out to be Obama’s picks, they aren’t the whole team. And anyway, Obama never pretended to be some kind of Noam Chomsky acolyte. He’s a mainstream liberal American president.
Still — and keep in mind that I’m speaking as someone who’s only modestly left of center on foreign affairs — this is a disturbingly hawkish team taken as a whole, isn’t it? I get the whole “water’s edge” thing, as well as Obama’s desire to bring back some kind of consensus in the national security arena, but it would be nice to see at least one or two really serious progressives getting some high profile national security positions that have the president’s ear, wouldn’t it? I mean, that is why most of us voted for him, right?
