THE LIMITS OF CHANGE: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ON THE FOREIGN POLICY FRONT
by Justin Raimondo

AntiWar.com
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Nov 2 2008

As I write this, we are 24 hours away from the end of this seemingly
endless presidential campaign, and all the signs point to a victory –
some would say an overwhelming victory – by Barack Obama. I won’t make
any predictions here, what with the Bradley Effect and other unknowns
– including the possibility of a "hanging chad"-like situation – but,
given the polls, it’s incumbent on me to give my readers an indication
of what to expect from an Obama administration in the foreign policy
department, and this is undoubtedly reflected in the personnel he’ll
assemble on his foreign policy team.

So who’s up for major appointments? A number of names have been
floated, some of them Republicans, for key positions like secretary of
defense and secretary of state, notably the idea of keeping Robert
Gates, the current defense chief, and bringing in Richard Lugar
for secretary of state. Both possibilities underscore the essential
continuity of our misguided and increasingly dangerous foreign policy
of global intervention. Bill Richardson is also being mentioned for
state, along with John "I Was For It Before I Was Against It" Kerry.

This particular appointment, however, doesn’t tell us much about the
foreign policy favored by Obama. Recent secretaries of state have
had minimal influence on actual policymaking and have often been at
odds with the White House; look at Colin Powell. This is due to the
ever-increasing power of the president over the conduct of U.S. foreign
policy, a realm surrendered to the executive by Congress, in principle,
long ago. Under President Bush, the process accelerated and the
foreign policymaking bureaucracy took on a distinctly monarchical
flavor. The president’s national security adviser, the one with
direct access to the king, became the key player. Condi Rice, with
her personal friendship with Bush II, was perfect for this role,
and the next national security adviser is liable to play a similarly
important part in shaping Obama’s decisions.

The most troubling possibility here is Dennis Ross, a career
foreign policy bureaucrat who was instrumental in shaping America’s
Israel-centric policy in the Middle East under George H.W. Bush and
Bill Clinton. He is a longtime associate of the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy (WINEP), the scholarly adjunct of AIPAC, Israel’s
powerful lobbying organization in the U.S., which he co-founded.

The beginning of Ross’ career as a civil servant is a good indicator
of what we might expect from him, and from the Obama administration
when it comes to setting Middle Eastern policy. When Ronald Reagan
was elected in 1980, he brought in Paul Wolfowitz to run the
policy planning at the State Department, and Wolfie brought in his
neocon buddies: I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay
Khalilzad, James Roche, Stephen Sestanovich, Alan Keyes (yes, that
Alan Keyes!), and Ross. In short, Ross has always been a reliable
member in good standing of the neocon foreign policy cabal, the very
same group that lied us into war with Iraq – and is now intent on
doing the same with Iran. Although the neocons who came to Washington
were mostly ex-Democrats, Ross stayed with his old party, although
partisan allegiances seem not to mean much to him. He has served
under three secretaries of state: James Baker, Warren Christopher,
and Madeleine Albright.

As special Middle East coordinator under President Bill Clinton, Ross
was responsible for managing the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,
a process described by former negotiating team member Aaron David
Miller as follows:

"With the best of motives and intentions, we listened to and followed
Israel’s lead without critically examining what that would mean for
our own interests, for those on the Arab side and for the overall
success of the negotiations. 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. 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."

"Without critically examining what that would mean for our own
interests" – that’s the key phrase here, one that fully describes
the effect (and also, perhaps, the intention) of our Middle Eastern
policy, one that puts Israel, not America, first.

Ross recently signed on to a plan, being pushed by something called
the Bipartisan Policy Center, that is nothing but a roadmap to war
with Tehran. The report, written in the form of recommendations
to an incoming president, says he must begin a military buildup
directed at Iran from "the first day [he] enters office." The plan
is to begin "pre-positioning additional U.S. and allied forces,
deploying additional aircraft carrier battle groups and minesweepers,
placing other war material in the region, including additional missile
defense batteries, upgrading both regional facilities and allied
militaries, and expanding strategic partnerships with countries such
as Azerbaijan and Georgia in order to maintain operational pressure
from all directions."

Yes, Georgia, America’s Israel of the Caucasus, is to be used as a
forward base of operations against Iran. Then there’s the oil-rich
tyranny of Azerbaijan, which is locked in a vicious ethnic war
of attrition with Armenia (and its own Armenian population). The
U.S. footprint, instead of shrinking under Obama, promises to grow
even larger.

So you wondered why, during the debates, Obama was so belligerent on
the Georgian question. Obama and McCain both hew to the War Party’s
Orwellian view, which grotesquely inverts the truth, decrying "Russian
aggression" when it was the Georgians who started that war. One
would normally expect this of McCain, whose chief foreign policy
adviser was, until very recently, a paid lobbyist for the Georgians,
but Obama, too, refuses to acknowledge Tbilisi’s aggression against a
"breakaway province." Ossetia has been de facto independent for more
than a decade, and the supposedly smart Obama is no doubt aware of
this – never mind the hundreds killed in the siege of Tskhinvali,
the Ossetian capital city mercilessly assaulted by Georgian troops.

It gets worse, however. Underscoring the point we have long made
at Antiwar.com – that it is impossible to separate these various
"theaters" of U.S. aggression, and that the Iraq and Afghan wars are
bound to spread – the report goes on to note:

"The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan offers distinct
advantages in any possible confrontation with Iran. The United States
can bring in troops and material to the region under the cover of
the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, thus maintaining a degree of
strategic and tactical surprise." [Emphasis added.]

Obama has long stressed he would immediately begin escalating the
Afghan campaign, and perhaps open up a new front in Pakistan. Certainly
the Bush administration has laid the groundwork for this eastward
shift of U.S. military resources – and so the stage is set.

When Rachel Maddow asked Obama the other day why our intervention
in Afghanistan wouldn’t end up like the Iraq war, or more so, he
emphatically rejected the comparison, yet he never addressed her
underlying concern. She just smiled, rather wanly, and went on to
the next question. I have another question, however, and it is this:
what if the Afghan "surge" is a feint, directed not at some vague
Taliban-affiliated tribes in the godforsaken wilds of Waziristan,
but at the mullahs of Tehran?

Under the pretext of going after Osama bin Laden, they can sneak
enough troops into the region through the back door, then easily
launch an attack from the east, and also from the north, where the
Azeris and the Georgians are talking about entering NATO. (Obama,
by the way, fully endorses Georgia’s NATO membership application,
although he hasn’t said anything, as far as I know, about the Azeris’
ambition to join the club.)

Whether or not Ross gets the national security post, the fact remains
that the War Party, far from being banished from Washington, will
have an inside track in the new administration. What’s different
about Obama, however, is that the other side also has a seat at
the table – or, at the very least, isn’t completely locked out of
the deliberations. I was astonished to learn that none other than
Gen. Anthony Zinni, retired Marine commander and trenchant critic
of the neocon influence on the making of American foreign policy,
is up for the job. A 2003 Washington Post profile of Zinni reports:

"The more he listened to [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz
and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni
became convinced that interventionist ‘neoconservative’ ideologues
were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they
didn’t understand. ‘The more I saw, the more I thought that this was
the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were
going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington
think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground.’ …

"The goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing democracy by
force reminds him of the ‘domino theory’ in the 1960s that the United
States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from
falling into communist hands. And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and
his neoconservative allies as the root of the problem. ‘I don’t know
where the neocons came from – that wasn’t the platform they ran on,’
he says. ‘Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured
the vice president.’"

I wouldn’t bet the farm on Zinni getting it, but the fact that he’s in
the running at all is astonishing. If that’s the amount of change you
want in American foreign policy, then you’ll be happy with the Obama
administration – even as they escalate the conflict in Afghanistan,
spread it to Pakistan, and prepare for war with Iran.