Cross posted at Turn Maine Blue
It is not realistic that any one woman or man has the knowldege, experience and energy to know how to lead our nation through the great variety of domestic and foreign matters that face our government. So those that aspire to the office of president hire advisors, women and men with learning and experience in particular fields that a candidate will use in the formation of policy.
Democracy Now!, hosted by Amy Goodman, has a great segment this morning which looks at the front running presidential candidates and their foreign policy advisors. Some of these names are well known, and the others less so, but all have one thing in common: the use of American force as an instrument of American foreign policy.
AMY GOODMAN: Presidential candidates are scrambling to win last-minute support in Iowa ahead of tonight’s caucus. Thousands of reporters have also descended on Iowa this week, covering everything from Mike Huckabee’s haircut to John Edwards’s rally with singer John Mellencamp.
But little attention has been paid to perhaps one of the most important aspects of the candidates: their advisers, the men and women who likely form the backbone of the candidate’s future cabinet if elected president. Many of the names will be familiar.
Advisers to Hillary Rodham Clinton include many former top officials in President Clinton’s administration: former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, former National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Senator Barack Obama’s list includes President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross.
Rudolph Giuliani’s advisers include Norman Podhoretz, one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement. John McCain’s list of official and formal policy advisers includes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, General Colin Powell, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, and former CIA Director James Woolsey. One of Mitt Romney’s top advisers is Cofer Black, the former CIA official who now serves as vice chair of Blackwater Worldwide. Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth is advising Fred Thompson.
Even Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger are advising a campaign. And what is astounding is that what many view as failed U.S. policies of the past (some of them egressious violations of the sovereignity of other nations) are now being touted as models for the next administration.
ALLAN NAIRN: McCain has General Alexander Haig, who oversaw the US policy of mass terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, when American nuns and religious workers were abducted, raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard. General Haig said those nuns died in an exchange of gunfire, the pistol-packing nuns. He has a younger—McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be doing today. Henry Kissinger advises McCain, as he advises many others. And Kissinger, of course, was responsible for mass death in Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, countless other places.
After listening/watching this segment, it's difficult to hope that things will change much if any of the front runners are nominated and elected.
Since the first election in which I could vote, 1980, I have seen my hope that my government would lead the way in creating a better world for all of us who live here. Time and again these hopes have been dashed, as scandal after scandal and intervention after intervention have left me a cynic. Seven plus years of Cheney/Bush have lowered my expectations for a better government, but then I learn things like this, and lower them further.
Is this what politics is supposed to be like?