Change or More of the Same? Obama Introduces His War Cabinet

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Give a listen or watch to a unique breakdown of the latest Obama appointees to his apparent War Cabinet. I hope he can direct these three in a more peaceful direction.

Change or More of the Same? Obama Introduces

President-Elect Barack Obama officially introduced his national security team at a news conference in Chicago yesterday. In announcing his choices of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to be secretary of state, Defense Secretary Robert Gates to continue in office and retired Marine General James Jones to serve as national security adviser, Obama has selected the core group of people who will be in charge of foreign policy decisions in his administration.

Peace

After Obama’s introduction, each Cabinet nominee gave brief remarks. The first was Senator Hillary Clinton. If confirmed as Secretary of State, she would be the nation"s top diplomat in the Obama administration.

Obama asked that Robert Gates remain as Secretary of Defense, a post he has held since late 2006 when he was tapped by President Bush to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Prior to that, Gates served as director of the CIA under president George HW Bush. Questions have swirled around his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal and his role in the US government’s arming of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. At yesterday’s news conference he thanked Obama for his offer to continue as Defense Secretary.

Obama introduced retired Marine General James Jones as his national security adviser. Jones is the former supreme allied commander of NATO. He now sits on the board of Chevron and is president and chief executive of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy. The institute has has been criticized by environmental groups for, among other things, calling for the immediate expansion of domestic oil and gas production and issuing reports that challenged the use of the Clean Air Ar to combat global warming. Jones thanked Obama for selecting him as his national security adviser.

Among his other Cabinet selections, Obama also named Susan Rice as his ambassador to the United Nations. Rice served as a senior foreign policy aide to Obama during his campaign. Under the Clinton administration, Rice worked for the National Security Council and the State Department. At yesterday"s news conference, she outlined some of the challenges that lay ahead.

For more on Obama’s national security team we are joined by two guests in Washington DC. Robert Dreyfuss is an investigative reporter and contributing editor at The Nation magazine. His blogs at the Nation online at The Dreyfuss Report. Steven Clemons is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation where he directs the American Strategy Program. He runs the popular blog The Washington Note.

Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor at The Nation magazine. He is author of "Devil"s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam."

Steven Clemons, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation where he directs the American Strategy Program.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on Obama’s national security team we are joined by two guests in Washington DC. Robert Dreyfuss is an investigative reporter and contributing editor at The Nation magazine. His blog at The Drefuss Report is at the nation.com. Steven Clemons is a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation where he directs the American Strategy Program. He runs the popular blog The Whasington Note.com. We welcome you both to DemocracyNow. Steve Clemons, let’s begin with you. Your accessment to the national security team, starting with Hiliary Clinton, and Robert Gates, and James Jones?

STEVEN CLEMONS: Is certainly is a fascinating trio. When you take all of them together, it has created some grief on some parts of the liberal political establishments. They were saying, hey, wait, didn’t we elect Barack Obama, not a Clintonized version of him? I encourage people to take a step back. Because one of my concerns in the campaign was that frequently, as my friend Bob Meyers pointed out, Obama kind of carved out a McCain-like position on Pakistan, on the role and future of the Pentagon. He actually wanted to increase the size of the military force, etc. I think we are going to see a lot of Pentagon hugging strategies from this group. What is interesting though, it is not a status quo preserving group. I think if you were to imagine some of the big Nixon goes to China moments that this country needs, particularly with Iran, with countries like Cuba, delivering on Syria and getting on a Libya- like tracks, this team seems to me more able to do that kind of thing than many other assemblies. And so while I know that Hillary Clinton during the campaign was very much an advocate of coercive diplomacy, something that I thought she talked too little about carrots and too much about sticks, I do think that she has to rewire herself and have a makeover, essentially, in much the way Obama has. Obama is not the same guy who ran during the election. We are seeing a very different Obama today. To some degree, I think we are going to see a different Hillary Clinton. Just in quick conclusion: the problem with this team, is it is very big guns. If Barack Obama takes his eye off the ball for a moment, if he is not engaged with these people for a moment, if he allows any distance to grow between himself and what he issues as national security policy in these big changes he wants to achieve, I think we are going to end up with a paralyzed national security team. In many ways it is a brilliant move, but it is hugely risky.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, your assessment?

ROBERT DREYFUSS: I agree with many things Steve said, but it is important to point out that the people who are not named, the people were not picked by Obama or the people who were not on the stage yesterday with the president elect. There was nobody there from the anti-war wing of the Democratic party. There were none of the liberal Senators or even people like Jim Webb who spoke out against the war. John Kerry and Al Gore were not there. Bill Richardson was not there. You can go down a long list of people who he did not choose. Instead, he chose what the Wall Street Journal and many other publications are calling a war cabinet. The problem is, in order to fulfill his central campaign promise, which is to get our troops out of Iraq, he is going to have to do some direct hand-to-hand combat with people like Robert Gates and General Petraeus who has political ambitions of his own, Admiral Mullen at the Joint Chief and elsewhere, who are going to be urging him to slow down, to take a step back, to relax, and not mess up the search that Gates has spent the last two years overseeing. I think he’ll be under a lot of pressure from the national security team that he himself is creating, to slow down the withdrawal from Iraq. He certainly left the door open for that. More generally, he pledged during the campaign to escalate the war in Afghanistan, which I think the rest of his team is fully in support of. Certainly, Robert Gates and general Petraeus have endorsed the notion of adding another 20,000 to 25,000 troops to that failed war, which I think is another catastrophically bad decision. He may find himself turning what had been Bush’s failed war in Afghanistan into his own failed war, especially if he carries it over across the border into Afghanistan. I think the problem here is that the Obama that tilted to the right during the election campaign, supposedly to protect himself against Republican criticism, in fact, turns out to be the real Obama. When he says, change comes from me, we are seeing the kind of change he believes in by appointing this centrist pro-military cabinet. That means In effect, that means it is change, that they’re not neoconservatives, certainly they are not going to look like John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feif, but it will look very much like the national security establishment of the Cold War and the post cold war 90’s.