Foreign Policy Advisers to Barack Obama

by David Hinz

Barack Obama has boasted that he has at least as much Foreign Policy experience as either Hillary Clinton or John McCain, based, in part, on the fact that he traveled to Pakistan while in High School. A more compelling argument could be made.

But, his comments do merit a look at the foreign policy advisers with whom he has chosen to surround himself. A brief look at his advisers, and both their own, and other people's thoughts about their expertise.

Denis McDonough

Denis McDonough is with the Center for American Progress -- Progressive Ideas for a Strong, Just and Free America. The name kind of says it all, don't you think? While with the CAP, he has done quite a bit of writing, expressing his thoughts on foreign policy. A Couple of excerpts on two major issues facing the nation, AGW and Iraq, follow:

Balancing Our Climate Debt: The Group of Eight Have an Obligation

The IPCC reports underscore the cruel irony implicit in climate change—that the overwhelming environmental costs of climate change will be felt in those countries least responsible for the atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and least able to deal with the consequences. The people least responsible for climate change will pay the biggest price, both in terms of economic costs and human costs.

Balancing Our Climate Debt

Current levels of development assistance from the industrialized world are woefully insufficient to help the least developed nations cope with this coming onslaught. Moreover, many developed countries, including the United States, do not calculate the costs of combating climate change when reviewing the long-term viability of the projects they are funding. A significant proportion of development aid, which is already inadequate, may be going to waste.

--snip--

For the United States, which has not yet undertaken a climate-risk assessment of its development activities, taking this first step would immediately improve the efficacy of U.S. aid dollars and help the world’s poor meet the escalating development challenges they face under climate change. But this is only a start to what needs to be done.

In order to ensure that lesser-developed countries have the capability to develop without relying on high-carbon technologies, the G8 nations and other industrialized countries led by the United States should seek to transfer to poorer countries the tools to drive their development along an alternative, clean energy path. This will be vital to the health of the global environment.

On Congressional Oversight of Iraq War

As we have witnessed all too clearly, our current Iraq authorization was nowhere near closure with the president’s assertion of “Mission Accomplished.” And the American people and the Congress have been presented with an ever-changing set of facts on the ground in Iraq and the region since that time.

At the same time, a resolution authorizing the use of force—which in the case of Iraq the president himself sought—is more flexible and envisions an ongoing role for Congress. Opponents of a Congressional debate about whether the existing authorization for the use of force in Iraq needs to be updated suggest that once Congress has authorized the use of force, it is then reduced to either providing the money the president requests to fight the war, or withholding it.

Zbignew Brzezinski

Brzezinzki was, of course a key ingredient of President Carter's foreign policy staff, a man who gave us 444 days of American citizens held hostage in Tehran, and the complete loss of respect for our nation throughout the world. We are still paying the price today for the mistakes this man made almost 30 years ago.

To look toward Brzezinski for answers is to look toward Mattel for armament.

Zbigniew Brzezinski's plan was to counter the rise of pro-Soviet left wing regimes with a string of Islamic regimes, countering Marxism with Islamism finally culminating in an Islamic overthrow of the USSR (replacing one monstrous regime with another monstrous regime). His dabbling in Afghanistan would eventually give birth to Taliban rule and Osama Bin Laden and September 11th, something he blames Israel and Neo-Cons for. In Iran, Zbigniew Brzezinski backed a policy that would support the Ayatollah Khomeni as America's new ally. And thus when the hostages were taken the United States waited instead of acting because Zbigniew Brzezinski's Green Belt strategy required an Islamic victory in Iran.

To show its affinity for the Mullahs, the Carter Administration had lifted a 1978 ban on arms sales to Tehran. The exiled Shah was barred from entering the United States to seek medical treatment. The United States even promised to defend Iran against the Soviet Union. Zbigniew Brzezinski met with the Ayatollah Khomeni's Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and offered the new regime a strategic relationship with the United States. It took five months before a rescue attempt was made and when Zbigniew Brzezinski planned out the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw it was sabotaged from the start by the chains placed on the operation from the Carter White House.

Brzezinski's plan to withdraw from Iraq will include a "peacekeeping force of other Muslim nations taking our place:

Since Iraq's neighbors are vulnerable to intensified ethnic and religious conflicts spilling over from Iraq, all of them -- albeit for different reasons -- are likely to be interested. More distant Arab states such as Egypt, Morocco or Algeria might also take part, and some of them might be willing to provide peacekeeping forces to Iraq once it is free of foreign occupation. In addition, we should consider a regional rehabilitation program designed to help Iraq recover and to relieve the burdens that Jordan and Syria, in particular, have shouldered by hosting more than 2 million Iraqi refugees.

Robert Malley

According to Wiki, Robert Malley is an American international relations expert, with his expertise being directed toward Arab/Israeli relations. He was a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, and was instrumental in the Camp David Summit. He has mostly blamed the failure of that summit to arrive at any peace accord, upon the Israelis. We have this World Net Daily article on Malley:

The officials noted Robert Malley, a principal Obama foreign policy adviser, has penned numerous opinion articles, many of them co-written with a former adviser to the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, petitioning for dialogue with Hamas and blasting Israel for numerous policies he says harm the Palestinian cause.

Malley also previously penned a well-circulated New York Review of Books piece largely blaming Israel for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in 2000 when Arafat turned down a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and eastern sections of Jerusalem and instead returned to the Middle East to launch an intifada, or terrorist campaign, against the Jewish state.

Malley's contentions have been strongly refuted by key participants at Camp David, including President Bill Clinton, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and primary U.S. envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, all of whom squarely blamed Arafat's refusal to make peace for the talks' failure.

From the New York Review of Books piece:

The President's decision to hold the Camp David summit despite Arafat's protestations illuminates much about US policy during this period. In June, Barak—who for some time had been urging that a summit be rapidly convened—told the President and Secretary Albright that Palestinian negotiators had not moved an inch and that his negotiators had reached the end of their compromises; anything more would have to await a summit. He also warned that without a summit, his government (at least in its current form) would be gone within a few weeks.

At the same time, Arafat posed several conditions for agreeing to go to a summit. First, he sought additional preparatory talks to ensure that Camp David would not fail. Second, he requested that the third Israeli territorial withdrawal be implemented before Camp David—a demand that, when rebuffed by the US, turned into a request that the US "guarantee" the withdrawal even if Camp David did not yield an agreement (what he called a "safety net"). A third Palestinian request—volunteered by Clinton, rather than being demanded by Arafat—was that the US remain neutral in the event the summit failed and not blame the Palestinians.

The administration by and large shared Arafat's views. The Palestinians' most legitimate concern, in American eyes, was that without additional preparatory work the risk of failure was too great. In June, speaking of a possible summit, Clinton told Barak, "I want to do this, but not under circumstances that will kill Oslo." Clinton also agreed with Arafat on the need for action on the interim issues. He extracted a commitment from Barak that the third Israeli withdrawal would take place with or without a final deal, and, in June, he privately told the Chairman he would support a "substantial" withdrawal were Camp David to fail. Describing all the reasons for Arafat's misgivings, he urged Barak to put himself "in Arafat's shoes" and to open the summit with a series of goodwill gestures toward the Palestinians. Finally, Clinton assured Arafat on the eve of the summit that he would not be blamed if the summit did not succeed. "There will be," he pledged, "no finger-pointing."

Samantha Power

Samantha Power is an award-winning journalist. She received a Pulitzer Prize for her book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," which [surprise -- surprise] takes a critical look at American foreign policy regarding various genocides in Africa. She told a Salon reporter:

I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world. I didn't get into journalism by any means to win a Pulitzer Prize or do anything like that. Back then, I was obsessed with what was going on in Bosnia. I went over there because of that; I tried to get a job at NGOs ... But I didn't wait this long [to work for a candidate] because I was such a hardcore reporter. It was because I never met anybody worth doing it for before.

That is what is wrong with Journalism today. It is NOT the job of a Journalism to "change the world," it is the job of a journalism to f****** report the news!

Her tenure as an Obama adviser took a turn for the worse, however, when she called Hillary Clinton a "monster," thereby incurring the wrath of, well, Hillary Clinton! She was sacked, err, withdrew from the campaign. She is now sorry for her statements.

Of course I regret them, I can't even believe they came out of my mouth. The campaign was getting very tense, and I -- in every public appearance I've ever made talking about Senator Clinton, I have sung her praises as the leader she's been, the intellect. She's also incredibly warm, funny. I've spent time with her. I think that I just had a very weak moment in seeing some of the tactics, it seems, that were getting employed. I was just afraid really that the campaign would not stay at the level it had been on and I let out in a wave of frustration.

Susan Rice:

Susan Rice is a Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institute, presently on leave to work for the Barack Obama campaign. She has previously worked, in a similar capacity for the John Kerry campaign, and the Howard Dean campaign. In her own words:

"There is more than one war happening simultaneously in Iraq. Yes, we have an insurgency, we have Al Qaeda and there is a counterinsurgency challenge; but there is also separately and simultaneously a raging civil war."

Monsoor Ijaz has some pointed comments about Susan Rice, and her role in allowing Osama bin Laden to escape from Sudan in 1996.

Mansoor Ijaz, a major Clinton financial supporter who hammered out the 1996 bin Laden agreement with the government of Sudan only to have the White House turn the offer down, issued the challenge Thursday during an interview with nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity.

"I'm saying this point blank," Ijaz announced in impassioned tones. "Clinton, Berger, Albright, Susan Rice - any of them that want to come and take us on. I've got the paperwork to back up what I've said and they know it. And they know they can't run and hide."

--snip--

Besides Berger and Reno, "Clearly the president had to have had a hand in making that decision," he added. "There's no question in my mind that he was involved in those decisions as well. There's no question about that at all."

The former Clinton negotiator suggested that Congress depose other witnesses who could corroborate and expand upon his account.

"The American people should know that I have even persuaded a senior Sudanese intelligence official, who was later the intelligence chief, that if it became necessary he would come to the United States and testify in closed hearings about precisely what they were prepared to do," he said. "And he would bring the data with him."

Another witness suggested by Ijaz: former Clinton administration ambassador to the Sudan, Tim Carney.

"Frankly, [Carney] can take the American people a couple of steps further in terms of taking them inside the deliberations that went on and telling people precisely how the politicizing of the intelligence took place at that time."

Ijaz also charged that Clinton officials deliberately went out of their way to stifle FBI anti-terrorism probes.

"The FBI, in 1996 and 1997, had their efforts to look at terrorism data and deal with the bin Laden issue overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan," he said.

In closing, it is difficult to believe that a political candidate for President of the United States could surround himself with a bigger bunch of misguided losers, without a deliberate intent to undermine the very government he seeks to lead.

If this bunch of wrong-headed fellow travelers is any indication of the Barack Obama foreign policy expertise he boasts about, an Obama presidency might well have all of us looking nostalgically at the days of President jimmy Carter.