Four More Wars? Candidates' Foreign Policy Advisors Dominated by Hawks

from the American Conservative, via AlterNet:



Four More Wars? Candidates' Foreign Policy Advisors Dominated by Hawks

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, The American Conservative. Posted November 7, 2007.


The 2008 hopefuls promised a change in foreign policy -- and then they hired the old guard.



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. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/66754/