It is difficult to look at the people advising Barack Obama on foreign policy and not be worried. Obama, who has served less than four years in the Senate, has been getting advice from an informal group of close to 300 people, a large number of whom are former Clinton Administration and Carter Administration officials and advisors to former Democratic senators like Edward Kennedy and Tom Daschle. In the wake of Obama's victory over Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democrat primaries, some of Mrs. Clinton's top foreign policy advisers like former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher have joined Obama's team.
But in trying to figure out who would be influential on foreign policy in the administration of a President Obama, you have to start with Vice President Joe Biden, who currently serves as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. To be sure, Biden has done some admirable things during his Senate tenure, which include pushing for a tougher American response to the gangsterism of Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s and he has fought to ensure that American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are better protected against roadside bombs. But for the most part, during his 35 years in the Senate, Biden has been on the wrong side of history.
Biden, elected to the Senate in 1972 at age 29, was part of the anti-war liberal cabal who joined Sen. George McGovern in working to cut off U.S. aid to South Vietnam, paving the way for a humanitarian disaster and geopolitical catastrophe for the United States. South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos falling to communist forces in 1975 marked the first time that the United States had ever lost a war. That defeat was followed by Cambodian genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in which several million people died, and by the ascendancy of communist dictatorships in Vietnam and Cambodia. Later during the 1970s, Biden worked closely with President Carter in the unsuccessful political campaign to get the SALT II arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union through the Democrat Senate.
During the 1980s, Biden fought against President Reagan's efforts to give aid to Nicaraguan resistance forces seeking to overthrow the Sandiinista dictatorship there, and the Delaware Democrat was a reliable against much of the Reagan defense buildup that helped bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1991, Biden fought unsuccessfully against the Senate resolution authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein's Iraqi army from Kuwait. Eleven years later, Biden voted in favor of using force to disarm Saddam's regime. But, ever since the Iraq war began five and a half years ago, Biden has been relentless in heaping scorn on the war effort. In recent years, he has opposed the very successful U.S. troop surge pushed by Sen. John McCain that is routing al Qaeda in Iraq.
Obama backers like The New Republic's Marty Peretz point out that Biden has long been a strong rhetorical supporter of Israel and sometime critic of the Iranian government, but they are not so interested in discussing his record as an apologist for the mullahcracy in Iran: Biden opposes U.S. military action against the regime, and groups like the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran consider him hostile to their efforts to encourage Iranians to overthrow the clerical dictatorship and replace it with a democracy.
Israeli journalist Caroline Glick points out that in 1998 Biden was one of only four senators to vote against the Iran Missile Proliferation Sanctions Act, a bill punishing foreign companies and other entities that sent Iran sensitive missile technology or expertise. In February 2005, Biden said in a speech to the global Davos Conference that Iran's quest for nuclear capabilities is understandable and called on the United States to address Iran's "emotional needs" by signing a non-aggression pact with Tehran. On September 26, 2007, the Senate voted 76-22 in favor of an bipartisan amendment introduced by Sens. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, and Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Independent Democrat, to impose sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, an organization which is in the forefront of sponsoring terrorism and violence - including the maiming and killing of American troops in Iraq. Biden was on the losing side of that vote, while Oba m a, who was absent, denounced the Kyl-Lieberman amendment and attacked Mrs. Clinton for voting in favor.
Aside from Biden, there are plenty of others on Team Obama who should be raising red flags. One is Gregory Craig, a senior foreign policy aide to Sen. Kennedy during the 1980s. Craig, a partner at the Washington-based Williams & Connolly law firm, served as State Department director of policy planning under Albright and President Clinton. Craig is a harsh critic of President Bush's Latin American policies, sometimes accusing Bush of "ignoring" Latin America, while at other times complaining that Bush has been "taking sides" in Latin American elections (usually against Leftists sympathetic to Fidel Castro or Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.) Gregory Craig played a critical role in returning young Elian Gonzalez to Fidel's gulag back in 2000; Craig was the lawyer representing Elian's father in his successful effort to force the child back to Cuba. Craig also served as President Clinton's lawyer during h is impeachment trial and represented UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan during the investigation of the Iraq oil-for-food scandal.
Anthony Lake, another top aide to Obama, previously worked for Presidents Carter and Clinton. While serving as national security advisor under Clinton in 1995, Mr. Lake became somewhat paranoid about the possibility that the CIA might attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein. So, after Bob Baer, one of the CIA's top covert operatives returned from a mission to Iraq, Lake got the FBI to launch an investigation of whether Baer had violated the legal prohibition against assassinating foreign leaders based on intelligence that had come from the Iranian government. After investigating Baer for more than one year, the Justice Department announced it would not press charges. But the damage was done; Baer had to spend time defending himself against the possibility of prosecution under a federal murder-for-hire statute instead of helping Iraqis who were attempting to overthrow Saddam. Baer left the agency shortly afterward.
Lake has acknowledged that the Clinton Administration was slow to respond to the 1994 Rwandan genocide and expressed regret for his own role on Rwanda. In recent years, Lake, along with Susan Rice, another top Obama foreign-policy aide, has taken to urging the United States to intervene in the Sudanese region of Darfur - with or without UN approval - even as both Obama advisors blast President Bush over every aspect of the war in Iraq.
Rice is a Brookings Institution scholar who has been one of the most high-profile Obama television talking-head surrogates. It is testimony to the media's pro-Obama bias that Rice seems to be getting a free pass over her own record as assistant secretary of state overseeing African affairs during the Clinton Administration. In his book Losing bin Laden, journalist Richard Miniter made the case that the Clinton Administration, and Rice in particular, ignored overtures by the Sudanese government during the 1990s to betray bin Laden and help the United States. While I'm not completely certain about Miniter's thesis, I have no doubt that if anyone had made such a charge about an aide to a prominent Republican politician, the subject would never go away.
Rice and Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism chief, have worked as a tag team during Obama campaign conference calls. Rice said last month that, by criticizing Obama's calls for withdrawal from Iraq, McCain was demonstrating "the height of hypocrisy" because "McCain has a long track record of supporting a reckless and extreme foreign policy." Clarke (who sounds like he stopped following the war in Iraq right after the 2006 elections in this country), said McCain advocated policies that "failed" in Iraq. What about the idea that Saddam Hussein's systematic violations of UN Security Council Resolutions and brutality toward his own people were primarily responsible for the second Iraq war? Clarke instead put the emphasis for the war on "extreme, neo-conservative advisors" to Bush who were spoiling for a fight with Saddam.
Regarding Middle East policy, Obama's advisers are an odd mix of people. They include President Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who makes no secret of his disdain for Israel and his belief that the United States needs to engage the mullahs in Iran. Former Clinton NSC official Robert Malley (who argues that the United States and Israel, not Yasser Arafat, were primarily to blame for the failure of the Camp David negotiations in 2000) was forced out after meeting with a representative of the terrorist group Hamas in the spring. Malley's ouster occurred just weeks after a Hamas representative praised Obama in an interview with WABC radio in New York. Supporters of Israel also have reason to be wary of Albright, who blamed Israel for the erosion of the anti-Saddam alliance in 1998.
But even the relatively pro-Israel members of Team Obama should give pause to clearheaded voters. Obama has been endorsed by Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer - part of the George H.W.Bush/ Bill Clinton State Department peace-process team. And Dennis Ross, who worked closely with Kurtzer and Miller during that period, is part of Obama's Mideast advisory team. All three of them are honorable people, but their most significant public-policy contributions were as members of Clinton's Oslo peace-process crew. But Oslo, despite the best intentions of its advocates ended in disaster in the fall of 2000 when Arafat made a strategic decision to go to war. In his memoir about Oslo, The Missing Piece, Ross writes with evident pride about how, working with Albright, he managed to pry Israeli territorial concessions to Arafat out of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during 1998-99. I pray that I a m wrong, but Ross's book may provide a preview of Obama's approach to the Mideast - pocketing concessions out of a democratic ally while giving short shrift to the looming Jihadist danger.
http://www.aim.org/guest-column/on-the- ... licy-team/
