People have made the point that the Obama house is flush with Clintonites, all of these people that we knew in the 1990s. Some people who were senior advisers to Hillary Clinton jumped onto the Obama bandwagon after Hillary conceded defeat. But what’s important to remember is what 1990s foreign policy looked like, because while Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to bring change, if you actually analyze US foreign policy from George H.W. Bush through Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, there are great consistencies.
Bill Clinton’s policies, his foreign policies in the 1990s, really laid the groundwork for much of what President Bush did when he was in office. You had the Iraq Liberation Act, which was passed in 1998, which was the result of a collusion between neoliberal Democrats, neoconservative Republicans. That made regime change in Iraq mandatory. Clinton mercilessly punished the people of Iraq through economic sanctions, the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam. They dismantled Yugoslavia, bombed it. They implemented policies such as the Rambouillet Accord against Milosevic, that was essentially a setup to take away Yugoslavia’s sovereignty, very similar to what Bush did in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Clinton hit Sudan. He hit Afghanistan. His free trade globalization policies devastated economies around the world and working people.
Many of the architects of those policies in the 1990s were not only people who supported the Iraq war in the lead-up and promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but they are now at the center of the Obama foreign policy team.
Joe Biden’s selection as the vice-presidential candidate was a clear indication that the old guard Democrats were going to be securely embedded in the Obama White House. One of the experiences in Biden’s life bears particular mention, and that is that Biden was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the summer of 2002, when the Iraq war was being debated. Joe Biden was the man in charge of framing the so-called debate, and he refused to call two witnesses, in particular, who would have thoroughly debunked all of the lies that were being told. One is the former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The other is the former head of the UN program in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck. The reason we wanted von Sponeck there is because he had just come back from the north of Iraq and had observed Ansar al-Islam guerrillas, the so-called al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, and would have testified that in fact they were not being trained by Saddam’s government, that they were receiving no assistance, that in fact they were fighting Saddam’s government and were operating from the US-enforced safe haven of northern Iraq, or Iraqi Kurdistan.
Rahm Emanuel, a hardliner on Israel, of course, also one of the key people in the passage of NAFTA and someone who’s called for a dramatic expansion of the US military.
Madeleine Albright, one of the deans of the Democratic policy elite, whether she gets a post or not in the Obama administration, many of her proteges are some of the key people operating now in the Obama team.
Richard Holbrooke, who of course was one of the point people in the genocide in East Timor under the Carter administration, who also was one of the key figures in dismantling of Yugoslavia and also promoted the myth that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and, in fact, praised Colin Powell’s fraudulent testimony before the United Nations, saying it was masterful diplomacy.
These are some of the key people there, including Tony Lake. The former National Security Adviser, deeply responsible for the destruction of Haiti.
Many of these people, at the top of the list, you have Dennis Ross, who was both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy, and Martin Indyk. Both of them work very closely with AIPAC, as well as the Project for a New American Century.
Michele Flournoy is one of the people that, down the line, may be tapped as the first female Defense secretary, also working with the Project for a New American Century, and in fact authored a paper that is said to have reframed Obama’s perspective on Iraq, backing him off of the total withdrawal rhetoric and looking more at a sort of residual force, downsized, rebranded occupation.
Sarah Sewall, who comes from the Carr Center at Harvard, we have to remember that Sarah Sewall is someone who has collaborated with General David Petraeus in rebranding American counterinsurgency doctrine. She wrote the introduction to the US Army Field Manual’s republication of the US Army Counterinsurgency Manual. This is a manual that is based on deception, lies, shadow warfare, paramilitary warfare. And she’s been criticized by progressives and other academics for collaborating with the military in developing how to make a better, more effective war machine that also can be spun in human rights circles as, well, softer than that of George W. Bush. Really what we’re talking about here is not just Bush-lite, but an extension of the sort of militaristic, belligerent foreign policy that has been a staple of the US machine for all of our lifetimes.
On the issue of Gitmo, Obama sends one message, but then brings on board as his intelligence transition team John Brennan, who Glenn Greenwald rightly described as an advocate of torture, someone who has passionately defended the US extraordinary rendition program, which began under President Clinton, the government-sanctioned kidnap-and-torture program; Jami Miscik, as well, another person who has spoken out in favor of these harsh interrogation tactics, as they’re called. So you have the stated policy, and then you have the people and their track records. And history is—best qualifies us to, speak about what’s actually going to happen.
But while he does call for shutting down Guantanamo, there are very hawkish components to the Obama plan. He has credited himself with calling for a surge in Afghanistan and saying that President Bush and John McCain followed his lead. He believes in a paramilitarization of the war on drugs in Central and Latin America. He is not going to shut down these private contractors that have made these offensive wars of aggression possible. His Iraq plan is a downsized, rebranded version of the Bush plan, through his residual force operations.
And then the position that he laid out at AIPAC, where he talked about Jerusalem must remain undivided, that was a speech that was crafted by well-known neoconservatives, and it was messaging to the very right-wing Jewish community in the United States as a way of saying that Obama was going to be pro-Israel. He went further, in fact, than President Bush. he said, well, the US embassy should be in Jerusalem. All the candidates say that, but then saying that Jerusalem must remain—must be undivided, that was further than a lot of Republicans are willing to take it.
we’re talking about heavy hitters who, whether they hold posts or not, are going to have great sway over Barack Obama. And that we have to remember, when Clinton first took office, there was not the identical euphoria, but people were glad that Bush was no longer in office, and Clinton turned out to be one of the greatest Republican presidents in history, really setting—co-opting the Republican agenda at times and making possible many of the policies Bush implemented.
A sort of disturbing trend is that we have sort of blue-state Fox emerging, where people are, sort of treating Obama in a different way than they would treat Bush or anyone else in power. When Bush first took power, there was a tremendous outcry over all of these old Reagan hands that were being brought back in and the neoconservatives and others.
The time is now to call the question on the involvement of some of these people, that this is the precise moment when this kind of journalism matters, when we have to remind people of the history and the previous policies implemented by the people that are at the center of Obama’s foreign policy team right now, because we’re going to be living with these people for the next four years running the show. And it’s incredibly important to be all over this right now, before they’re named.
You have over 120 members of the House of Representatives who had the foresight to actually vote against the war, and you had twenty-three US senators who voted against the war. And you have Russ Feingold, who voted against the USA PATRIOT Act. And you have former CIA analysts, like Mel Goodman and Ray McGovern, who should be consulted and asked who they think should be running Central Intelligence and be the director of National Intelligence. Almost all these people have been on the show. The Obama campaign should look back at Democracy Now!’s archives to find all of these people who were very credible, who actually have been right about US foreign policy—bring them into the fold.
Discussion: Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez.
Jeremy Scahill, award-winning investigative journalist, Democracy Now! correspondent, and author of the international bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His latest article was just published on AlterNet.org. It’s called “This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama’s White House“.
– from democracynow. 20 Nov 2008.
This is the old show. How many of these people are now on power?