[Peace-discuss] The Scum Also Rises

[C. G. Estabrook]

	War Whisperers
	The 2008 hopefuls promised a change in foreign policy
	then hired the old guard.
	by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

It may surprise no one that former deputy secretary of defense and 
ousted World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz still enjoys the red-carpet 
treatment among Washington’s elite. That he indulged in it at the 
screening of an HBO documentary about 10 wounded Iraq War veterans who 
barely made it home alive from the conflict Wolfowitz helped to engineer 
might raise an eyebrow.

Yet he was singled out as a VIP at the Sept. 5 premier of “Alive Day 
Memories: Home from Iraq” and was still smiling after the screening, 
which featured insurgent footage of IED attacks, severed limbs, shredded 
brains, and left hardly a dry eye in the place. Organizers discreetly 
overlooked Wolfowitz’s marquee role in justifying the invasion that 
brought them all together.

The continued deference to former administration officials extends to 
the very lifeblood of the city right now—the presidential election, 
where neoconservative war boosters still enjoy A-list invites, give and 
get tons of money, and have the ear of top-tier GOP candidates. 
Meanwhile, old and new Democratic hawks have largely pushed anti-war 
liberals to the margins of the establishment, creating think tanks with 
muscular names and erudite journals to catapult their colleagues into 
top-level jobs in a new Democratic administration.

Despite the declining appetite for war among regular Americans, the 
message is clear: when it comes to shaping future foreign policy for 
either party, hawks and internationalists are in, doves and realists are 
out.

“My view is, if you want a shift in strategy, you aren’t going to get it 
from these people, who are just hungry for a job in the next 
administration,” observed one Beltway policy wonk. Any conceivable 
Democratic White House, he noted, would smell a lot like the status quo. 
Reappearing would be a phalanx of Clinton I protagonists with names like 
Albright, Holbrooke, Lake, and Berger, followed by a lesser-known 
generation of liberal interventionists like Peter Beinart, Lee 
Feinstein, Martin Indyk, and Anne-Marie Slaughter.

They inhabit a growing galaxy of politically ambitious Democrats, most 
of whom have been careful to criticize President Bush’s war in Iraq on 
mostly tactical points, for hubris and unilateralism, but not his 
doctrine of regional democratization and preemptive intervention.

It is not so far from their own humble beginnings, after all. Most of 
the Democratic policy advisers today cut their teeth in the Clinton 
administration, where they oversaw a disastrous military-humanitarian 
mission in Somalia, approved strategic strikes and sanctions on Iraq, 
believed Saddam Hussein was amassing weapons of mass destruction, and 
ultimately supported his ouster.

But it was in the 1994 NATO bombing of Serbia and the subsequent Dayton 
Peace Accords that Team Clinton found its foreign-policy mojo.

Richard Holbrooke, today a key adviser to Hillary Clinton , has called 
the Balkans a huge show of strength and moral authority. “There will be 
other Bosnias in our lives,” the former assistant secretary of state 
declared in his 1998 memoir, To End a War, about the peace accords he 
helped broker, “areas where early outside involvement can be decisive 
and American leadership will be required. … The world will look to 
Washington for more than rhetoric the next time we face a challenge to 
peace.”

Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security adviser during the Balkan war, 
said in a 1993 speech, “We have the blessing of living in the world’s 
most powerful and respected nation at a time when the world is embracing 
our ideals as never before. We can let it slip away. Or we can mobilize 
our nation in order to enlarge democracy, enlarge markets and enlarge 
our future.” He’s now a top adviser in the Obama campaign.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, considered a close adviser 
of Mrs. Clinton, was right there with them. In his memoir An American 
Journey, Colin Powell recalled how, in 1993, he urged the newly-minted 
Clinton team not to bomb Bosnia too hastily. According to Powell, 
Albright countered exasperatedly, “what’s the point of having this 
superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

“I thought I would have an aneurysm,” wrote Powell, whose similar 
protests on the road to Iraq would earn him a slow isolation from the 
Bush inner circle a decade later.

Nonetheless, Holbrooke, Albright, Lake, and former National Security 
Adviser Sandy Berger are “first spear” centurions leading a larger army 
of Clintonites—now with wife Hillary or chief rival Barack Obama—seeking 
to advance the goals they nurtured in the 1990s. Nearly all were in 
support of the 2003 invasion of Iraq or discreet about their 
reservations. Nearly all have re-emerged this campaign season with a 
renewed belief in Wilsonian international engagement, a continued 
presence in Iraq, and a hawkish stance on the Middle East.

In Hillary’s camp, Jim Steinberg, former Clinton deputy national 
security adviser and Brookings Institute fellow, joins Martin Indyk, who 
served as a special assistant for Middle East affairs on the Clinton 
National Security Council after eight years at the pro-Israel Washington 
Institute for Near East Policy and several years at the American Israel 
Public Affairs Committee.

Indyk heads Brookings’ Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which is 
funded by Israeli-American media mogul Haim Saban. The center also 
employs Kenneth Pollack, another booster of the 2003 invasion who has 
been linked to Sen. Clinton, and analyst Michael O’Hanlon, who confirms 
that he supports her. Center fellow and former Clinton official Bruce 
Riedel has reportedly been advising the Obama camp.

Lee Feinstein, a Council on Foreign Relations director and former 
Clintonite, fits right in with Hillary’s campaign. In April 2003, he 
told CNN that he was confident “U.S. forces over time will find weapons 
of mass destruction and also find evidence of programs to build weapons 
of mass destruction” in Iraq, even though it was becoming increasingly 
clear they would not.

More recently, Feinstein has been aligned with a bustling coterie of 
what one writer called “hot policy wonks for the Democrats,” expounding 
on the virtues of democracy building and intervention, particularly to 
stop genocide in places like Darfur. To this end, Feinstein teamed up in 
2004 with Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at 
Princeton University and another oft-mentioned future White House 
official, to write “A Duty to Prevent” for Foreign Affairs, the lede of 
which extols, “The international community has a duty to prevent 
security disasters as well as humanitarian ones—even at the price of 
violating sovereignty.”

Slaughter is ambitious, though it isn’t yet clear which camp she 
supports. Her résumé is long and prestigious; her work a year ago with 
G. John Ikenberry on the Princeton Project on National Security 
generated buzz that continues today. Their final report, “Forging a 
World of Liberty Under Law,” outlines a “liberal international order” 
for ultimate peace and security worldwide.

If the United Nations cannot be reformed to give determined democracies 
real authority to intervene in countries in crisis, they argue, then an 
alternative world body should be established that would. At some point, 
according to the writers, such a confederation might include a military 
arm “to confront their mutual security challenges.”

Peter Beinart, who insists he is not advising anyone, has reportedly 
inspired the top-tier candidates with his recipe for a liberal return to 
muscular global democracy in The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only 
Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. At what 
The Hotline called a “smashingly well-attended book party at the home of 
Nancy Jacobson and [Hillary for President pollster] Mark Penn,” both 
Clintons were on hand to praise him.

Hillary also spoke at the August launch of a new think tank of centrist 
Democrats and a smattering of Republicans called the Center for a New 
American Security founded by former Clinton defense officials Michele 
Flournoy and Kurt Campbell. (The ironic similarity in name to the 
neoconservative Project for the New American Century has not been lost.)

The group, which includes Derek Chollet, a key adviser to the John 
Edwards campaign, supports a long-term, albeit smaller, U.S. presence in 
Iraq, but insists that future foreign interventions shouldn’t be 
curtailed because of Iraq’s failures.

To be fair, Obama’s team has reached out to more of a mixed crowd, 
engaging former Clintonites Susan Rice, an African expert at Brookings, 
and Washington lawyer Mark Brzezinski. Obama also snagged the 
endorsement of Brzezinski’s father, Carter National Security Adviser 
Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense, is also working 
with Obama. He is one of many from the Center for American 
Progress—headed by former Clinton deputy chief of staff and Hillary 
supporter John Podesta—working with the top tier. Korb has championed a 
redeployment plan for U.S. troops and recently co-authored an op-ed for 
the Boston Globe entitled “How to withdraw quickly and safely.”

While Hillary has been courting military brass—most notably Ret. Gen. 
Jack Keane, who co-wrote the current surge strategy with Frederick Kagan 
of the American Enterprise Institute—Obama has reportedly sought advice 
from Ret. Gen. Powell.

“I think the neoconservatives have certainly been discredited,” Korb 
insisted to TAC. “I think that’s what we’re coming back to—getting rid 
of extremes.”

That said, no less than eight names associated with the Clinton and 
Obama campaigns—including Indyk, Steinberg, and O’Hanlon—have turned up, 
in some cases multiple times, on statements and letters authored by the 
Project for the New American Century, the brainchild of neoconservatives 
Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, launched to “accept responsibility for 
America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order 
friendly to our security, our prosperity and our principles.”

Republican candidate and frontrunner Rudy Giuliani not only believes in 
the Bush doctrine, he pumped it up with steroids in the 
September/October issue of Foreign Affairs. Beginning with, “we are all 
members of the 9/11 generation,” and ending with “only principled 
strength can lead to a realistic peace,” the 6,000-word manifesto has 
the prints of his predominantly neoconservative team all over it.

Led by former Reagan aide and Hoover Institution fellow Charles Hill, 
there is Harvard Professor Martin Kramer, who works with the Washington 
Institute for Near East Policy; Peter Berkowitz of Hoover; Kim Holmes of 
the Heritage Foundation; Stephen Rosen of Harvard; Enders Wimbush of the 
Hudson Institute; Commentary eminence Norman Podhoretz; and the newest 
addition, author Daniel Pipes, who has been waging an online war against 
American “Islamofascist” college professors.

Giuliani, who recently said he is not averse to using tactical nuclear 
weapons against Iran, has no doubt found his muse in Podhoretz. Upon 
releasing his latest opus, World War IV, Podhoretz predicted in a 
National Review Online Q&A that his toddler granddaughters will be in 
their 30s by the time the global war on Islamofascism is won and that 
“confusion” over the real mission in Iraq may detract from George W. 
Bush’s legacy, which will ultimately be that of “a great president.”

He compared Giuliani to Reagan, said Americans who did not support his 
World War IV construct were living in fear-induced denial, and did not 
back off earlier claims that ongoing violence in Iraq is just a symptom 
of its nascent democracy.

While supporting the mission of global American hegemony, Martin Kramer 
makes it clear that not all nations, particularly Muslim ones, are 
destined for the “advance of human freedom” Bush described to a joint 
session of Congress in 2001. Admitting his ideas clash with the 
president’s, Kramer has publicly explained that undemocratic regimes 
that nevertheless ensure security, avert war, and combat terrorism 
should be left alone.

At an AEI-sponsored event in June, Kramer explained his brand of 
neorealism as an Arab-regime thing: “any attempt to promote democracy, 
far from making things better, might make [conditions] worse,” for 
broader U.S. and Israeli interests in the region.

Kramer did not name the regimes in question, but his new Giuliani 
colleague Berkowitz did in a column for the Israeli-based Ha’aretz 
newspaper in 2005, pointing to West-friendly Jordan, Kuwait, and Egypt. 
One might as well throw in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which are now 
considered Petri dishes of Islamic revolution because of what Kramer 
appraisingly called “consensual authoritarianism.”

Canvassing the campaigns, it is hard to find a conservative of any other 
stripe advising the top tiers, indicating that like Wolfowitz’s 
continued celebrity, neoconservativism is far from being upstaged.

Earlier reports indicated that old Bush I realists like Brent Scowcroft 
and Lawrence Eagleburger, who before the Iraq invasion said he was 
“scared to death that the Richard Perles and Wolfowitzes of this world 
are arguing that we can do [Iraq] in a cakewalk,” had the ear of Sen. 
John McCain. They were to be outnumbered, however, squeezed in with 
hawks like James Woolsey, Max Boot, Henry Kissinger, and Robert 
Kagan—all of whom made pre-war prognostications that were more eerily 
off the mark.

“This isn’t surprising,” Fred Barnes, editor of the Weekly Standard, 
told the Washington Times in August. “This is where the national 
security expertise and wisdom is among Republican conservatives.”

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney—who has also said he would go nuclear on Iran—has 
engaged J. Cofer Black, who led the CIA operations in Afghanistan and is 
vice chairman of the controversial Blackwater USA, a security contractor 
in Iraq that has recently been banned from the country.

Reportedly, Romney is also consulting with Dan Senor, the former 
mouthpiece for the Coalition Provisional Authority in post-invasion 
Iraq. In his exposé of the occupation, Imperial Life in the Emerald 
City: Life in Iraq’s Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran described Senor as 
“viceroy” of L. Paul Bremer’s inner circle. Senor, he wrote, “never 
conceded a mistake, and his efforts to spin failures into successes 
sometimes reached the point of absurdity.”

Fred Thompson has, so far, a more ideologically varied staff, but a 
common Bushian thread is evident. There is Mary Matalin, Dick Cheney’s 
media henchwoman; Liz Cheney, Bush State Department official and 
daughter of the vice president; former Energy Secretary Spence Abraham; 
and Rich Galen, who served in Iraq as an occupation devotee and spin doctor.

“In Washington, nothing succeeds more than failure,” declares Ted 
Carpenter, defense policy expert for the CATO Institute. “How else do 
you explain it?”

Some insiders try. Big donors influence campaigns and endow think tanks 
that breed advisers candidates want. “Outside the box” thinking is not 
only seen as limp cache in this self-sustaining scene, but it’s openly 
despised by an establishment that quickly closes ranks when it feels 
threatened. The big loser? The American public, which will find few 
alternatives at the voting booth and a future as certain as the recent 
past.
_____________________________________

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance reporter.