[Peace-discuss] War Party's decisive influence

[C. G. Estabrook]

The War Party's decisive influence in the Obama administration is going to be 
rolled out on Monday, so that even the most craven Obama-bots on the Left [sic] 
will be left wondering who and what they voted for. Hillary the hawk at State, 
Bush's warlord Robert Gates at Defense, and Gen. Jim Jones – who wants to 
station U.S. troops in the occupied territories under the rubric of NATO! – as 
national security adviser to the president. Yes, antiwar voters took a chance on 
Obama, reasoning that anything would be better than four more years of Bushian 
belligerence, yet now they discover to their chagrin that the dice are loaded.

The same old crowd that brought us the invasion of Iraq is back, if not in full 
force or purest form, then at least in worrying numbers and high positions. The 
cries of "betrayal" are already being heard. The response from the Obama cult 
among the liberal landed gentry, in particular the ones who own choice pieces of 
editorial real estate in the nation's top newspapers, was delivered by E. J. 
Dionne from his perch at the Washington Post:

"In electing Barack Obama, the country traded the foreign policy of the second 
President Bush for the foreign policy of the first President Bush. That is the 
meaning of Obama's apparent decision to keep Robert Gates on as defense 
secretary and also to select Hillary Clinton as secretary of state."

This delights Dionne, even as it depresses those anti-interventionist voters who 
thought they had an ally in the White House...

--Justin Raimondo, "The End of the Affair: Obama and the antiwar movement," 
December 1, 2008; full article at http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=13838