[Pen-l] This is change?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in 
Obama's White House
By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on November 20, 2008, Printed on November 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107666/

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith 
people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts 
will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal 
politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will 
inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best 
immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can 
be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to 
his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not 
looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over 
the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn 
about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, 
the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill 
Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board 
early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the 
hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly 
true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, 
freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton 
foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't 
lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it 
is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked 
like. Bill Clinton's  boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden 
hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. 
Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in 
retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former 
President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of 
economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and 
under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern 
Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam 
Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan 
were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the 
North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs 
and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated 
globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing 
countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War 
on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of 
U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and 
other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like 
Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the 
East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an 
extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several 
of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging 
foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing 
foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried 
out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama 
has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

-- His plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan;

-- An Iraq plan that could turn into a downsized and rebranded 
occupation that keeps U.S. forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future;

-- His labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a "terrorist organization;"

-- His pledge to use unilateral force inside of Pakistan to defend U.S. 
interests;

-- His position, presented before the American Israel Public Affairs 
Committee (AIPAC), that Jerusalem "must remain undivided" -- a remark 
that infuriated Palestinian officials and which he later attempted to 
reframe;

-- His plan to continue the War on Drugs, a backdoor U.S. 
counterinsurgency campaign in Central and Latin America;

-- His refusal to "rule out" using Blackwater and other armed private 
forces in U.S. war zones, despite previously introducing legislation to 
regulate these companies and bring them under U.S. law.

Obama did not arrive at these positions in a vacuum. They were carefully 
crafted in consultation with his foreign policy team. While the verdict 
is still out on a few people, many members of his inner foreign policy 
circle -- including some who have received or are bound to receive 
Cabinet posts -- supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Some 
promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. A few 
have worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American 
Century, whose radical agenda was adopted by the Bush/Cheney 
administration. And most have proven track records of supporting or 
implementing militaristic, offensive U.S. foreign policy. "After a 
masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful 
mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of 
Washington's Democratic insider community, a collective group that 
represents little 'change you can believe in,'" notes veteran journalist 
Robert Parry, the former Associated Press and Newsweek reporter who 
broke many of the stories in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s.

As news breaks and speculation abounds about cabinet appointments, here 
are 20 people to watch as Obama builds the team who will shape U.S. 
foreign policy for at least four years:

Joe Biden

There was no stronger sign that Obama's foreign policy would follow the 
hawkish tradition of the Democratic foreign policy establishment than 
his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate. Much has been 
written on Biden's tenure as head of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, but his role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq stands 
out. Biden is not just one more Democratic lawmaker who now calls his 
vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq "mistaken;" Biden was 
actually an important facilitator of the war.

In the summer of 2002, when the United States was "debating" a potential 
attack on Iraq, Biden presided over hearings whose ostensible purpose 
was to weigh all existing options. But instead of calling on experts 
whose testimony could challenge the case for war -- Iraq's alleged WMD 
possession and its supposed ties to al-Qaida -- Biden's hearings treated 
the invasion as a foregone conclusion. His refusal to call on two 
individuals in particular ensured that testimony that could have proven 
invaluable to an actual debate was never heard: Former Chief United 
Nations Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter and Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year 
veteran diplomat and the former head of the U.N.'s Iraq program.

Both men say they made it clear to Biden's office that they were ready 
and willing to testify; Ritter knew more about the dismantling of Iraq's 
WMD program than perhaps any other U.S. citizen and would have been in 
prime position to debunk the misinformation and outright lies being 
peddled by the White House. Meanwhile, von Sponeck had just returned 
from Iraq, where he had observed Ansar al Islam rebels in the north of 
Iraq -- the so-called al-Qaida connection -- and could have testified 
that, rather than colluding with Saddam's regime, they were in a battle 
against it. Moreover, he would have pointed out that they were operating 
in the U.S.-enforced safe haven of Iraqi Kurdistan. "Evidence of 
al-Qaida/lraq collaboration does not exist, neither in the training of 
operatives nor in support to Ansar-al-Islam," von Sponeck wrote in an 
Op-Ed published shortly before the July 2002 hearings. "The U.S. 
Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq 
poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. 
To argue otherwise is dishonest."

With both men barred from testifying, rather than eliciting an array of 
informed opinions, Biden's committee whitewashed Bush's lies and helped 
lead the country to war. Biden himself promoted the administration's 
false claims that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq, declaring 
on the Senate floor, "[Saddam Hussein] possesses chemical and biological 
weapons and is seeking nuclear weapons."

With the war underway, Biden was then the genius who passionately 
promoted the ridiculous plan to partition Iraq into three areas based on 
religion and ethnicity, attempting to Balkanize one of the strongest 
Arab states in the world.

"He's a part of the old Democratic establishment," says retired Army 
Col. Ann Wright, the State Department diplomat who reopened the U.S. 
embassy in Kabul in 2002. Biden, she says, has "had a long history with 
foreign affairs, [but] it's not the type of foreign affairs that I want."

Rahm Emanuel

Obama's appointment of Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel as Chief of 
Staff is a clear sign that Clinton-era neoliberal hawks will be 
well-represented at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. A former senior Clinton 
advisor, Emanuel is a hard-line supporter of Israel's "targeted 
assassination" policy and actually volunteered to work with the Israeli 
Army during the 1991 Gulf War. He is close to the right-wing Democratic 
Leadership Council and was the only member of the Illinois Democratic 
delegation in the Congress to vote for the invasion of Iraq. Unlike many 
of his colleagues, Emanuel still defends his vote. As chair of the 
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, Emanuel promoted 
the campaigns of 22 candidates, only one of who supported a swift 
withdrawal from Iraq, and denied crucial Party funding to anti-war 
candidates. "As for Iraq policy, at the right time, we will have a 
position," he said in December 2005. As Philip Giraldi recently pointed 
out on Antiwar.com, Emanuel "advocates increasing the size of the U.S. 
Army by 100,000 soldiers and creating a domestic spying organization 
like Britain's MI5. More recently, he has supported mandatory 
paramilitary national service for all Americans between the ages of 18 
and 25."

While Obama has at times been critical of Clinton-era free trade 
agreements, Emanuel was one of the key people in the Clinton White House 
who brokered the successful passage of NAFTA.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

For all the buzz and speculation about the possibility that Sen. Clinton 
may be named Secretary of State, most media coverage has focused on her 
rivalry with Obama during the primary, along with the prospect of her 
husband having to face the intense personal, financial and political 
vetting process required to secure a job in the new administration. But 
the question of how Clinton would lead the operations at Foggy Bottom 
calls for scrutiny of her positions vis-a-vis Obama's stated 
foreign-policy goals.

Clinton was an ardent defender of her husband's economic and military 
war against Iraq throughout the 1990s, including the Iraq Liberation Act 
of 1998, which ultimately laid the path for President George W. Bush's 
invasion. Later, as a U.S. senator, she not only voted to authorize the 
war, but aided the Bush administration's propaganda campaign in the 
lead-up to the invasion. "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his 
chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability 
and his nuclear program," Clinton said when rising to support the 
measure in October 2002. "He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary 
to terrorists, including al-Qaida members … I want to insure that Saddam 
Hussein makes no mistake about our national unity and for our support 
for the president's efforts to wage America's war against terrorists and 
weapons of mass destruction."

"The man who vowed to deliver us from 28 years of Bushes and Clintons 
has been stocking up on Clintonites," New York Times columnist Maureen 
Dowd recently wrote. "How, one may ask, can he put Hillary -- who voted 
to authorize the Iraq war without even reading the intelligence 
assessment -- in charge of patching up a foreign policy and a world 
riven by that war?"

Beyond Iraq, Clinton shocked many and sparked official protests by 
Tehran at the United Nations when asked during the presidential campaign 
what she would do as president if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear 
weapons. "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will 
attack Iran," she declared. "In the next 10 years, during which they 
might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able 
to totally obliterate them."

Clinton has not shied away from supporting offensive foreign policy 
tactics in the past. Recalling her husband's weighing the decision of 
whether to attack Yugoslavia, she said in 1999, "I urged him to bomb. … 
You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the 
major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend 
our way of life?"

Madeleine Albright

While Obama's house is flush with Clintonian officials like former 
Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Defense Secretary William Perry, 
Director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning Greg Craig 
(who was officially named Obama's White House Counsel) and Navy 
Secretary Richard Danzig, perhaps most influential is Madeleine 
Albright, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of State and U.N. ambassador. 
Albright recently served as a proxy for Obama, representing him at the 
G-20 summit earlier this month. Whether or not she is awarded an 
official role in the administration, Albright will be a major force in 
shaping Obama's foreign policy.

"It will take time to convince skeptics that the promotion of democracy 
is not a mask for imperialism or a recipe for the kind of chaos we have 
seen in the Persian Gulf," Albright recently wrote. "And it will take 
time to establish the right identity for America in a world that has 
grown suspicious of all who claim a monopoly on virtue and that has 
become reluctant to follow the lead of any one country."

Albright should know. She was one of the key architects in the 
dismantling of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. In the lead-up to the 1999 
"Kosovo war," she oversaw the U.S. attempt to coerce the Yugoslav 
government to deny its own sovereignty in return for not being bombed. 
Albright demanded that the Yugoslav government sign a document that 
would have been unacceptable to any sovereign nation. Known as the 
Rambouillet Accord, it included a provision that would have guaranteed 
U.S. and NATO forces "free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access 
throughout" all of Yugoslavia -- not just Kosovo -- while also seeking 
to immunize those occupation forces "from any form of arrest, 
investigation or detention by the authorities in [Yugoslavia]." 
Moreover, it would have granted the occupiers "the use of airports, 
roads, rails and ports without payment." Similar to Bush's Iraq plan 
years later, the Rambouillet Accord mandated that the economy of Kosovo 
"shall function in accordance with free-market principles."

When Yugoslavia refused to sign the document, Albright and others in the 
Clinton administration unleashed the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, 
which targeted civilian infrastructure. (Prior to the attack, Albright 
said the U.S. government felt "the Serbs need a little bombing.") She 
and the Clinton administration also supported the rise to power in 
Kosovo of a terrorist mafia that carried out its own ethnic-cleansing 
campaign against the province's minorities.

Perhaps Albright's most notorious moment came with her enthusiastic 
support of the economic war against the civilian population of Iraq. 
When confronted by Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” that the sanctions were 
responsible for the deaths of "a half-million children … more children 
than died in Hiroshima," Albright responded, "I think this is a very 
hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." (While 
defending the policy, Albright later called her choice of words "a 
terrible mistake, hasty, clumsy, and wrong.")

Richard Holbrooke

Like Albright, Holbrooke will have major sway over U.S. policy, whether 
or not he gets an official job. A career diplomat since the Vietnam War, 
Holbrooke's most recent government post was as President Clinton's 
ambassador to the U.N. Among the many violent policies he helped 
implement and enforce was the U.S.-backed Indonesian genocide in East 
Timor. Holbrooke was an Assistant Secretary of State in the late 1970s 
at the height of the slaughter and was the point man on East Timor for 
the Carter Administration.

According to Brad Simpson, director of the Indonesia and East Timor 
Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George 
Washington University, "It was Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski 
[another top Obama advisor], both now leading lights in the Democratic 
Party, who played point in trying to frustrate the efforts of 
congressional human-rights activists to try and condition or stop U.S. 
military assistance to Indonesia, and in fact accelerated the flow of 
weapons to Indonesia at the height of the genocide."

Holbrooke, too, was a major player in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and 
praised the bombing of Serb Television, which killed 16 media workers, 
as a significant victory. (The man who ordered that bombing, now-retired 
Army Gen. Wesley Clark, is another Obama foreign policy insider who 
could end up in his cabinet. While Clark is known for being relatively 
progressive on social issues, as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, he 
ordered bombings and attacks that Amnesty International labeled war crimes.)

Like many in Obama's foreign policy circle, Holbrooke also supported the 
Iraq war. In early 2003, shortly after then-Secretary of State Colin 
Powell's speech to the UN, where he presented the administration's 
fraud-laden case for war to the UN (a speech Powell has since called a 
"blot" on his reputation), Holbrooke said: "It was a masterful job of 
diplomacy by Colin Powell and his colleagues, and it does not require a 
second vote to go to war. … Saddam is the most dangerous government 
leader in the world today, he poses a threat to the region, he could 
pose a larger threat if he got weapons of mass destruction deployed, and 
we have a legitimate right to take action."

Dennis Ross

Middle East envoy for both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Ross was 
one of the primary authors of Obama's aforementioned speech before AIPAC 
this summer. He cut his teeth working under famed neoconservative Paul 
Wolfowitz at the Pentagon in the 1970s and worked closely with the 
Project for the New American Century. Ross has been a staunch supporter 
of Israel and has fanned the flames for a more hostile stance toward 
Iran. As the lead U.S. negotiator between Israel and numerous Arab 
nations under Clinton, Ross' team acted, in the words of one U.S. 
official who worked under him, as "Israel's lawyer."

"The 'no surprises' policy, under which we had to run everything by 
Israel first, stripped our policy of the independence and flexibility 
required for serious peacemaking," wrote U.S. diplomat Aaron David 
Miller in 2005. "If we couldn't put proposals on the table without 
checking with the Israelis first, and refused to push back when they 
said no, how effective could our mediation be? Far too often, 
particularly when it came to Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, our 
departure point was not what was needed to reach an agreement acceptable 
to both sides but what would pass with only one -- Israel." After the 
Clinton White House, Ross worked for the Washington Institute for Near 
East Policy, a hawkish pro-Israel think tank, and for FOX News, where he 
repeatedly pressed for war against Iraq.

Martin Indyk

Founder of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Indyk spent 
years working for AIPAC and served as Clinton's ambassador to Israel and 
Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, while also playing a 
major role in developing U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran. In addition 
to his work for the U.S. government, he has worked for the Israeli 
government and with PNAC.

"Barack Obama has painted himself into a corner by appealing to the most 
hard-line, pro-Israel elements in this country," Ali Abunimah, founder 
of ElectronicInifada.net, recently told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, 
describing Indyk and Dennis Ross as "two of the most pro-Israel 
officials from the Clinton era, who are totally distrusted by 
Palestinians and others across the Middle East, because they're seen as 
lifelong advocates for Israeli positions."

Anthony Lake

Clinton's former National Security Advisor was an early supporter of 
Obama and one of the few top Clintonites to initially back the 
president-elect. Lake began his foreign policy work in the U.S. Foreign 
Service during Vietnam, working with Henry Kissinger on the "September 
Group," a secret team tasked with developing a military strategy to 
deliver a "savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam."

Decades later, after working for various administrations, Lake "was the 
main force behind the U.S. invasion of Haiti in the mid-Clinton years," 
according to veteran journalist Allan Nairn, whose groundbreaking 
reporting revealed U.S. support for Haitian death squads in the 1990s. 
"They brought back Aristide essentially in political chains, pledged to 
support a World Bank/IMF overhaul of the economy, which resulted in an 
increase in malnutrition deaths among Haitians, and set the stage for 
the current ongoing political disaster in Haiti." Clinton nominated Lake 
as CIA Director, but he failed to win Senate confirmation.

Lee Hamilton

Hamilton is a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and 
was co-chairman of both the Iraq Study Group and 9/11 Commission. Robert 
Parry, who has covered Hamilton's career extensively, recently ran a 
piece on Consortium News that characterized him this way: "Whenever the 
Republicans have a touchy national-security scandal to put to rest, 
their favorite Democratic investigator is Lee Hamilton. … Hamilton's 
carefully honed skill for balancing truth against political comity has 
elevated him to the status of a Washington Wise Man."

Susan Rice

Former Assistant Secretary of Sate Susan Rice, who served on Bill 
Clinton's National Security Council, is a potential candidate for the 
post of ambassador to the U.N. or as a deputy national security advisor. 
She, too, promoted the myth that Saddam had WMDs. "It's clear that Iraq 
poses a major threat," she said in 2002. "It's clear that its weapons of 
mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path 
we're on." (After the invasion, discussing Saddam's alleged possession 
of WMDs, she said, "I don't think many informed people doubted that.")

Rice has also been a passionate advocate for a U.S. military attack 
against Sudan over the Darfur crisis. In an op-ed co-authored with 
Anthony Lake, she wrote, "The United States, preferably with NATO 
involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese 
airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port 
Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would 
deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing."

John Brennan

A longtime CIA official and former head of the National Counterterrorism 
Center, Brennan is one of the coordinators of Obama's intelligence 
transition team and a top contender for either CIA Director or Director 
of National Intelligence. He was also recently described by Glenn 
Greenwald as "an ardent supporter of torture and one of the most 
emphatic advocates of FISA expansions and telecom immunity." While 
claiming to oppose waterboarding, labeling it "inconsistent with 
American values" and "something that should be prohibited," Brennan has 
simultaneously praised the results achieved by "enhanced interrogation" 
techniques. "There has been a lot of information that has come out from 
these interrogation procedures that the agency has, in fact, used 
against the real hard-core terrorists," Brennan said in a 2007 
interview. "It has saved lives. And let's not forget, these are hardened 
terrorists who have been responsible for 9/11, who have shown no remorse 
at all for the death of 3,000 innocents."

Brennan has described the CIA's extraordinary rendition program -- the 
government-run kidnap-and-torture program enacted under Clinton -- as an 
absolutely vital tool. "I have been intimately familiar now over the 
past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. Government has 
been involved in," he said in a December 2005 interview. "And I can say 
without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing 
intelligence that has saved lives."

Brennan is currently the head of Analysis Corporation, a private 
intelligence company that was recently implicated in the breach of Obama 
and Sen. John McCain's passport records. He is also the current chairman 
of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade 
association of private intelligence contractors who have dramatically 
increased their role in sensitive U.S. national security operations. 
(Current Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell is former 
chairman of the INSA.)

Jami Miscik

Miscik, who works alongside Brennan on Obama's transitional team, was 
the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq 
war. She was one of the key officials responsible for sidelining intel 
that contradicted the official line on WMD, while promoting intel that 
backed it up.

"When the administration insisted on an intelligence assessment of 
Saddam Hussein's relationship to al-Qaida, Miscik blocked the skeptics 
(who were later vindicated) within the CIA's Mideast analytical 
directorate and instructed the less-skeptical counterterrorism analysts 
to 'stretch to the maximum the evidence you had,' " journalist Spencer 
Ackerman recently wrote in the Washington Independent. "It's hard to 
think of a more egregious case of sacrificing sound intelligence 
analysis in order to accommodate the strategic fantasies of an 
administration. … The idea that Miscik is helping staff Obama's top 
intelligence picks is most certainly not change we can believe in." 
What's more, she went on to a lucrative post as the Global Head of 
Sovereign Risk for the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers.

John Kerry and Bill Richardson

Both Sen. Kerry and Gov. Richardson have been identified as possible 
contenders for Secretary of State. While neither is likely to be as 
hawkish as Hillary Clinton, both have taken pro-war positions. Kerry 
promoted the WMD lie and voted to invade Iraq. "Why is Saddam Hussein 
attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don't even try?" 
Kerry asked on the Senate floor in October 2002. "According to 
intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is 
developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and 
biological warfare agents."

Richardson, whose Iraq plan during his 2008 presidential campaign was 
more progressive and far-reaching than Obama's, served as Bill Clinton's 
ambassador to the UN. In this capacity, he supported Clinton's December 
1998 bombing of Baghdad and the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. "We 
think this man is a threat to the international community, and he 
threatens a lot of the neighbors in his region and future generations 
there with anthrax and VX," Richardson told an interviewer in February 1998.

While Clinton's Secretary of Energy, Richardson publicly named Wen Ho 
Lee, a scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a target in 
an espionage investigation. Lee was accused of passing nuclear secrets 
to the Chinese government. Lee was later cleared of those charges and 
won a settlement against the U.S. government.

Robert Gates

Washington consensus is that Obama will likely keep Robert Gates, George 
W. Bush's Defense Secretary, as his own Secretary of Defense. While 
Gates has occasionally proved to be a stark contrast to former Secretary 
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he would hardly represent a break from the 
policies of the Bush administration. Quite the opposite; according to 
the Washington Post, in the interest of a "smooth transition," Gates 
"has ordered hundreds of political appointees at the Pentagon canvassed 
to see whether they wish to stay on in the new administration, has 
streamlined policy briefings and has set up suites for President-elect 
Barack Obama's transition team just down the hall from his own E-ring 
office." The Post reports that Gates could stay on for a brief period 
and then be replaced by Richard Danzig, who was Clinton's Secretary of 
the Navy. Other names currently being tossed around are Democratic Sen. 
Jack Reed, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (a critic of the Iraq occupation) 
and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who served alongside Biden on the 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Ivo H. Daalder

Daalder was National Security Council Director for European Affairs 
under President Clinton. Like other Obama advisors, he has worked with 
the Project for the New American Century and signed a 2005 letter from 
PNAC to Congressional leaders, calling for an increase in U.S. ground 
troops in Iraq and beyond.

Sarah Sewall

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Peacekeeping and 
Humanitarian Assistance during the Clinton administration, Sewall served 
as a top advisor to Obama during the campaign and is almost certain to 
be selected for a post in his administration. In 2007, Sewall worked 
with the U.S. military and Army Gen. David Petraeus, writing the 
introduction to the University of Chicago edition of the Army/Marine 
Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. She was criticized for this 
collaboration by Tom Hayden, who wrote, "the Petraeus plan draws 
intellectual legitimacy from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights 
Policy, whose director, Sarah Sewall, proudly embraces an 'unprecedented 
collaboration [as] a human rights center partnered with the armed forces.'”

"Humanitarians often avoid wading into the conduct of war for fear of 
becoming complicit in its purpose," she wrote in the introduction. "'The 
field manual requires engagement precisely from those who fear that its 
words lack meaning."

Michele Flournoy

Flournoy and former Clinton Deputy Defense Secretary John White are 
co-heading Obama's defense transition team. Flournoy was a senior 
Clinton appointee at the Pentagon. She currently runs the Center for a 
New American Security, a center-right think-tank. There is speculation 
that Obama could eventually name her as the first woman to serve as 
defense secretary. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported: "While 
at CNAS, Flournoy helped to write a report that called for reducing the 
open-ended American military commitment in Iraq and replacing it with a 
policy of 'conditional engagement' there. Significantly, the paper 
rejected the idea of withdrawing troops according to the sort of a fixed 
timeline that Obama espoused during the presidential campaign. Obama has 
in recent weeks signaled that he was willing to shelve the idea, 
bringing him more in line with Flournoy's thinking." Flournoy has also 
worked with the neoconservative Project for the New American Century.

Wendy Sherman and Tom Donilon

Currently employed at Madeline Albright's consulting firm, the Albright 
Group, Sherman worked under Albright at the State Department, 
coordinating U.S. policy on North Korea. She is now coordinating the 
State Department transition team for Obama. Tom Donilon, her 
co-coordinator, was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and 
Chief of Staff at the State Department under Clinton. Interestingly, 
Sherman and Donilon both have ties to Fannie Mae that didn't make it 
onto their official bios on Obama's change.gov Web site. "Donilon was 
Fannie's general counsel and executive vice president for law and policy 
from 1999 until the spring of 2005, a period during which the company 
was rocked by accounting problems," reports the Wall Street Journal.

***

While many of the figures at the center of Obama's foreign policy team 
are well-known, two of its most important members have never held 
national elected office or a high-profile government position. While 
they cannot be characterized as Clinton-era hawks, it will be important 
to watch Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, co-coordinators of the Obama 
foreign policy team. From 2000 to 2005, McDonough served as foreign 
policy advisor to Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and worked 
extensively on the use-of-force authorizations for the attacks on 
Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which Daschle supported. From 1996 to 
1999, McDonough was a professional staff member of the House 
International Relations Committee during the debate over the bombing of 
Yugoslavia. More recently, he was at the Center for American Progress 
working under John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and the 
current head of the Obama transition.

Mark Lippert is a close personal friend of Obama's. He has worked for 
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, as well as the Senate Appropriations 
Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. He is a lieutenant in the 
Navy Reserve and spent a year in Iraq working intelligence for the Navy 
SEALs. "According to those who've worked closely with Lippert," Robert 
Dreyfuss recently wrote in The Nation, "he is a conservative, cautious 
centrist who often pulled Obama to the right on Iraq, Iran and the 
Middle East and who has been a consistent advocate for increased 
military spending. 'Even before Obama announced for the presidency, 
Lippert wanted Obama to be seen as tough on Iran,' says a lobbyist who's 
worked the Iran issue on Capitol Hill, 'He's clearly more hawkish than 
the senator.' "

***

Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change to Washington. "I 
don't want to just end the war," he said early this year. "I want to end 
the mindset that got us into war." That is going to be very difficult if 
Obama employs a foreign policy team that was central to creating that 
mindset, before and during the presidency of George W. Bush.

"Twenty-three senators and 133 House members who voted against the war 
-- and countless other notable individuals who spoke out against it and 
the dubious claims leading to war -- are apparently not even being 
considered for these crucial positions," observes Sam Husseini of the 
Institute for Public Accuracy. This includes dozens of former military 
and intelligence officials who spoke out forcefully against the war and 
continue to oppose militaristic policy, as well as credible national 
security experts who have articulated their visions for a foreign policy 
based on justice.

Obama does have a chance to change the mindset that got us into war. 
More significantly, he has a popular mandate to forcefully challenge the 
militaristic, hawkish tradition of modern U.S. foreign policy. But that 
work would begin by bringing on board people who would challenge this 
tradition, not those who have been complicit in creating it and are 
bound to continue advancing it.

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 and is a frequent contributor to The Nation 
and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the 
Nation Institute.
© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/107666/
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