Left News and Views

By Tom Eley
1st December 2008

Prominent voices from the political right have endorsed President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet picks, both for his economic and national security teams.

On November 28, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial entitled Obama’s War Cabinet, which lauded President-elect Barack Obama’s widely-anticipated decisions to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense and to select retired general James Jones as National Security Adviser, the top two civilian military positions in the federal government. The selections, the editorial notes, mean that Obama intends to carry on the Bush Administration’s military policy in Iraq and beyond.

The Journal writes, These are the Administration posts most critical
to the successful conduct of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to possible entanglements with Iran, North Korea and who knows who else. With these personnel picks, Mr. Obama reveals a bias for competence, experience and continuity.

In other words, the selections define an administration that will not only carry on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan i.e., continuity, but that will be prepared to prosecute future wars.

The editorial celebrates the fact that the Gates selection effectively solidarizes Obama with the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq, noting that it amounts to an endorsement of President Bush’s surge in Iraq and its military architect, General David Petraeus, who the current Defense Secretary championed.

This was a departure from the positions of candidate Obama, the Journal points out, who opposed the surge [and] called for a speedy withdrawal from Iraq. In this regard, the selection of James Jones, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, was another reassuring get to the Journal. Jones was also an advocate of the surge strategy in Iraq, whereby the US military drowned the Sunni resistance in blood.

The Journal infers from the selection of Gates, President-elect Obama gave Mr. Gates some reassurances about future policy and his ability to shape it without repudiating the Secretary’s record to date.

What could be involved in this quid pro quo between Gates and Obama?

The Journal notes that Mr. Gates has staked out positions “on missile defense in Eastern Europe, enlarging the military, and modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal” that are at odds with the Democratic establishment. These positions will very likely become national security hallmarks of the Obama administration.

The Journal editorial is a testament to the real balance of forces in American political life, in which imperialist politics dominate Washington regardless of the party affiliations of either the president or the Congressional majority.

The editorial notes that the selection of Gates will provide political insulation from the right. Republicans may be less willing to criticize a Defense Secretary who served GOP Presidents.

But why should this be the central concern of the Obama administration? The Republican Party, after all, has suffered two consecutive political humiliations in the elections of 2006 and 2008, largely based on its association with the war in Iraq. The outgoing Republican president, George Bush, is the most despised in US history.

On the other hand, the Journal notes that Gates and Jones can help Mr. Obama check the worst reflexes of his anti-anti-terror base. In other words, the national security team effectively repudiates the anti-war majority of the population and of the electorate who supported Obama in the hope that his presidency might lead to ending both the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s militarism.

Indeed, the Journal laughs off Obama’s own declarations about ending
the war in Iraq as so much campaign rhetoric. Obama’s pledge to remove most combat troops by 2010 leaves open exactly what he means by “combat and ˜most” the editorial notes. The new status-of-forces agreement with Iraq also commits the U.S. to leave by 2011. These decisions can now be made with a view to the realities in Iraq rather than to the American campaign trail.

The Journal has been joined in its praise of Obama’s national security
selections by Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who, appearing on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos”, hailed the selections as excellent. Lugar is among a number of leading Republicans who have closed ranks with the incipient Obama administration, including Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, and Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee.

Leading right wing figures have also applauded Obama’s selections for
his top economic advisors. These include New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner, who will be Treasury Secretary; Lawrence Summers, a former Clinton treasury secretary, who will chair the National Economic Council; Peter Orszag, who will be director of the Office of Management and Budget, and former Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker, who will lead the newly-created Economic Recovery Advisory Board. All have been hailed as centrist choices.

Joseph Lieberman, the renegade Democratic senator from Connecticut who
campaigned feverishly on behalf of Obama’s Republican opponent, John
McCain, called Obama’s economic advisors just about perfect. Obama
intervened on behalf of Lieberman in order to preserve his position as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee over massive rank-and-file Democratic opposition.

McCain, for his part, has been effusive, as one account puts it, of Obama’s likely selection for head of the Homeland Security Department, Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, a Democrat. Karl Rove, formerly the top advisor to President Bush, also praised the economic advisors in a Wall Street Journal editorial entitled Thanksgiving Cheer from Obama.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/dec2008/obam-d01.shtml