Ending the Mindset -- or was that just the Mindfuck

[blackascoal]

Ending the Mindset

With a national security team with a record of supporting war in Iraq and Afghanistan, dissenting views will have to come from outside Washington, and from Obama himself.

December 3, 2008

During the primary season, candidate Barack Obama spoke eloquently about the need to end not just a war that "should've never been authorized and should've never been waged" but also the "mindset that got us into war" in the first place. Yet as president-elect, he has assembled a national security team whose top members--Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and James Jones--either voted to authorize the war or have been waging it. Maybe being right about the greatest foreign policy disaster in US history doesn't mean that much inside the Beltway? Obama has said he welcomes "vigorous debate" and "dissenting views" from his so-called "team of rivals," but with no oppositional--or even unconventional--voice on foreign policy, how will this group of establishment figures bring about the promised transformation of mindset?

On the matter of Iraq, debate and dissent will likely have to come from Obama himself. On December 1, he reaffirmed his plan to withdraw troops within sixteen months, and there is no reason to expect that he'll renege on his signature pledge to "give the military a new mission: ending this war" on the first day of his presidency. But Obama's Iraq plan--sound in principle--has always been heavily qualified with caveats about reassessment based on recommendations from advisers and the military. One of those advisers, Gates, as George W. Bush's defense secretary (an office he will continue to hold), vocally opposed Obama's withdrawal plan. Another, former Marine commander Jones, Obama's choice for national security adviser, has declared a timeline for withdrawal to be "against our national interest." As president, will Obama set the policy and stick to the vision laid out in his campaign? Or will recommendations from Gates, Jones and other military leaders sway the course?

On other foreign policy issues, Obama is generally in alignment with his national security team. Neither he nor his advisers advocate the Bush doctrine of unilateral military action and preventive war, and all seem inclined to restore diplomacy and multilateral engagement as tools of US foreign policy. Even Gates has urged diplomacy with Iran, decried the "gutting" of America's "soft power" and warned of the "creeping militarization" of foreign policy. Obama's appointment of key adviser Susan Rice as UN ambassador and his restoration of that post to the cabinet are dramatic breaks from Bush's contempt for international institutions. And although Hillary Clinton's hawkish record and vote for the Iraq War are of concern, her nomination is an opportunity for the State Department to reassert itself and diminish the alarmingly large foreign policy role Bush assigned the Defense Department. These gestures toward diplomacy and engagement will be greatly amplified if President Obama and his advisers move swiftly and decisively, as they have signaled they will, to sign global treaties on climate change, women's and children's rights and nuclear weapons reduction, and abolish torture and shut down Guantánamo.

In other respects, the emerging national security consensus of the incoming Obama administration reflects troubling positions Obama has taken in the past. Like Obama, Gates and Jones advocate increasing the US military presence in Afghanistan. As a draft of a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that America was caught in a "downward spiral" in Afghanistan, Gates said that there is "no reason to be defeatist." But extracting the United States from one disastrous occupation to head into another will drain resources needed to fulfill Obama's plans for economic recovery, healthcare and energy independence, and will crowd out other international initiatives.

It is also highly unlikely that Obama's plans to increase the size of the military and expand NATO will be subject to "vigorous debate" within his cabinet. Of course, Obama still has an opportunity to change the mindset that got us into Iraq and more. He has a popular mandate to end failed policies and craft a smarter security policy for these times. But he's sure making his work toughter with the team he's assembled. In many areas, fresh thinking will have to come from outside his administration--and outside Washington.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081222/editors2?rel=hp_currently

When I heard Obama speak of "ending the mindset", it was the very moment I decided to support him. Unfortunately nothing he has said or done since he uttered those words have led me to believe that they were anything other than a mindfuck to get elected.

Time will tell which one it was.

 

[Bonestorm]

From the NY Times a few days ago:

WASHINGTON — As President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday, it includes two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

The adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, cast the issue slightly differently in an interview on Sunday.

“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem,” he said. “During the campaign the then-senator invested a lot of time reaching out to retired military and also younger officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to draw on lessons learned. There wasn’t a meeting that didn’t include a discussion of the need to strengthen and integrate the other tools of national power to succeed against unconventional threats. It is critical to a long-term successful and sustainable national security strategy in the 21st century.” Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work, even though President Bush repeatedly promised such a shift, starting in a series of speeches in late 2005. But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr. Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home.

Mr. Obama’s best political cover may come from Mr. Gates, the former Central Intelligence Agency director and veteran of the cold war, who just months ago said it was “hard to imagine any circumstance” in which he would stay in his post at the Pentagon. Now he will do exactly that.

A year ago, to studied silence from the Bush White House, Mr. Gates began giving a series of speeches about the limits of military power in wars in which no military victory is possible. He made popular the statistic, quoted by Mr. Obama, that the United States has more members of military marching bands than foreign service officers.

He also denounced “the gutting of America’s ability to engage, assist and communicate with other parts of the world — the ‘soft power’ which had been so important throughout the cold war.” He blamed both the Clinton and Bush administrations and said later in an interview that “it is almost like we forgot everything we learned in Vietnam.”

Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, General Jones, took the critique a step further in a searing report this year on what he called the Bush administration’s failed strategy in Afghanistan, where Mr. Obama has vowed to intensify the fight as American troops depart from Iraq. When the report came out, General Jones was widely quoted as saying, “Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” a comment that directly contradicted the White House.

But he went on to describe why the United States and its allies were not winning: After nearly seven years of fighting, they had failed to develop a strategy that could dependably bring reconstruction projects and other assistance into areas from which the Taliban had been routed — making each victory a temporary one, reversed as soon as the forces departed.

Several times during his presidency, Mr. Bush promised to alter that strategy, even creating a “civilian reserve corps” of nation-builders under State Department auspices, but the administration never committed serious funds or personnel to the effort. If Mr. Obama and his team can bring about that kind of shift, it could mark one of the most significant changes in national security strategy in decades and greatly enhance the powers of Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state.

Mrs. Clinton may find, as her predecessor Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration discovered, that building up civilian capacity is easier to advocate than execute.

That problem will be no less acute for Mr. Obama in Afghanistan, where the building projects and job-creation activities that Mr. Bush promised in 2002, soon after the invasion, and then again in late 2005, have ground to a halt in many parts of the country because the security situation has made it too dangerous for the State Department’s “provincial reconstruction teams” to operate.

Ms. Rice recently ordered a review of what had gone wrong with the reconstruction team strategy, part of a broader review of Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy that the Bush White House is turning over to its successors.

Mr. Obama has promised a diplomatic push that is much broader than Afghanistan. In October 2007, he pledged to make diplomacy a high priority. “Instead of shuttering consulates, we need to open them in the tough and hopeless corners of the world,” he said.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama promised to double overall American aid — to $50 billion — by 2012. In recent months he has begun to lengthen that timetable, citing the financial crisis.

One of the biggest questions, though, will be whether the money to expand this civilian capability comes out of the Pentagon budget. So far, Congress has been very reluctant to go down that road.

Mr. Gates acknowledged a year ago, during the Landon Lecture at Kansas State University, that for many in the Pentagon it was “blasphemy” for “a sitting secretary of defense to travel halfway across the country to make a pitch to increase the budget of other agencies.”

He noted that when Adm. Mike Mullen was chief of naval operations, “he once said he’d hand a part of his budget to the State Department ‘in a heartbeat’ assuming it was spent in the right place.” Admiral Mullen is now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he met Mr. Obama two weeks ago for their first lengthy discussion of priorities. It was not clear if he was asked to give up part of his budget.

 

[blackascoal]

As I said my brother .. time will tell.

The test of Obama's course will be on stage real soon .. in fact, we are already carrying out his plans in Pakistan.

 

[Cancel7]

It was reported yesterday that he's going to go to the middle east, shortly after he becomes president, and give a major speech on relations between the US and that region.

I think he's going to pursue a diplomatic course across the board, but I think he's going to make the right noises to keep the DC insiders, and the right, happy.

But as you say, we'll see.

 

[blackascoal]

It was reported yesterday that he's going to go to the middle east, shortly after he becomes president, and give a major speech on relations between the US and that region.

I think he's going to pursue a diplomatic course across the board, but I think he's going to make the right noises to keep the DC insiders, and the right, happy.

But as you say, we'll see.

The one thing I "hope" for is that I'm wrong about him .. but facts keep getting in the way of that hope.