"Sixteen years ago, President-elect Bill Clinton headed for Washington with a national security team that was unprepared for a new age of foreign policy marked by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. Clinton proclaimed upon arrival that "foreign policy is not what I came here to do," and the weakness of his national security team confirmed his attitude."
In Melvin A. Goodman’s piercing op-ed, published in The Public Record,http://pubrecord.org/..., , he discusses the dangers of letting today’s grave economic issues distract us from the imperative to convey a vastly changed mindset regarding Iraq and Afghanistan along with the need to de-militarize and de-politicize intelligence and foreign policy. That these areas have become so intertwined has left us increasingly vulnerable and unable to fight anything other than the last battle.
Bringing up the lead is Robert Gates who, according to Goodman, "supports a variety of positions that will complicate Obama’s overall agenda, including a Reliable Replacement Warhead for our strategic missile force, national missile defense at home, missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic, and immediate NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia."
Gates is far from the only one. While many in the Obama team are strong choices, there are certain areas in which the president-elect has shown a reluctance to step back from both Clinton and Bush. Rather than continue the sins of the past and merely re-locate an over-stressed military to rain more bombs and bullets over Afghanistan, might it not be more effective to dial back a clash of civilizations and begin, in earnest, the nation building promised so many years ago?
Economic troubles taking precedence over all else, it is natural that our focus has drifted away from defense and intelligence. But if history is to have any meaning, it is to guarantee that future threats in these areas will reshape and resurface in ever more dangerous ways. It is imperative that when they do, we be ready to show the world a vastly different face. While continuity and playing to the middle might explain a choice like Gates, we do not have such a luxury this time around, thanks to what has gone so wrong the past eight years. With seventy percent of the country wanting out of Iraq, with at least that many wanting to see said funding go to our own needs, it is difficult to believe that the majority of Americans want the only defense change to be a shift from Iraq to Afghanistan.
Goodman continues:
"Obama is approaching inauguration with a secretary of defense who does not support many of the foreign policy positions that the president-elect took during the campaign; a secretary of state who was chosen for domestic political reasons; and without two key intelligence advisers—the director of national intelligence (the so-called intelligence tsar) and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency . . . For the past sixteen years, the Clinton and Bush administrations have operated by the seat of their pants in the international arena, lacking any strategic policy planning. Obama appeared to offer better. Now, continuity appears to be the name of the game."
With so many balls to juggle, the president-elect cannot afford to relegate the critical issues of defense and intelligence to the past. Should he do so, he will find a difficult and ugly way ahead of him and of us. In order to portray an image of real strength, Obama has to, in Mr. Goodman’s words, "flip the switch" on a series of Bush administration decisions that have harmed the interests of the United States."