May 2, 2012 |
It's hard to watch the Romney campaign with a straight face. Their latest crackup has one Romney adviser,
John Lehman, warning of the “Soviet threat," and
another, Pierre Prosper, complaining that the administration hasn't
done enough to stand with Czechoslovakia. And those comments were hardly
the first time we've heard throwbacks to the Cold War in this campaign.
But don't laugh too hard—it might distract from the dangerous and
discredited worldview Romney's foreign policy team is pushing.
Despite Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan and his ramping
up of drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, Romney claims Obama is a
president who does not want “America to be the strongest nation on
earth,” as
he told an audience at the Citadel military college in South Carolina.
Romney’s persistent knocks on Obama’s foreign policy make
clear that, while the economy will be the number-one issue this year,
foreign policy will be a close runner-up. Behind Romney’s statements on
world affairs is a group of close advisers whose views harken back to
the Bush administration’s belligerent neoconservative brand of US
foreign policy--not the best idea, considering how discredited it has
become.
“The most striking aspect of Romney's approach to foreign policy is
its lack of creativity -- its brazen willingness to recycle Bush-era
talking points, attitudes, and of course personnel,” said Peter Certo, a
researcher at Right Web, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.
“A Romney administration would be a fresh canvas for the neocons to
paint on.”
As the general election season heats up, the noise from the
neoconservative wing of the Republican Party will only grow louder. So
here’s a look at three of the top advisers shaping Romney’s view of the
world.
1. Eliot Cohen. Currently a professor at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies,
Cohen was a founder of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and is now a
special adviser
for the Romney campaign. The Washington, DC-based PNAC was an
influential incubator of neoconservative policy ideas whose members
later went on to successfully push for the invasion of Iraq. He was a
member of the Defense Policy Board, a Department of Defense advisory
committee, while Donald Rumsfeld ran the show, and served as counselor
to Condoleezza Rice while she was Secretary of State.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks,
Cohen penned a
Wall Street Journal op-ed
in which he labeled the US “war on terror” as “World War IV,” and
advocated for the overthrow of both the Iranian and Iraqi governments.
Cohen’s focus on Iran has not relented: in 2009,
another op-ed in the Journal again called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime—which could only be accomplished by a full-scale invasion and occupation.
In October 2011, the prominent neoconservative wrote the foreword to a "
white paper" laying out Romney’s foreign policy vision. It reads, in the words of
journalist Max Blumenthal, as “a concoction of post-9/11 unilateralism and unvarnished neo-imperialism.”
The paper calls for boosting the military budget, and the
assertion of US dominance in Asia against a “rising China.” The document
also warns that the Arab Spring might become an “Arab winter” due to
Iranian or Islamist influence, and criticizes the Obama administration’s
plan on Iraq, which called for 3,000 troops to stay in the country
after the expiration of the Status of Forces Agreement. The white paper
called for 14,000-18,000 troops to stay on in the country. Today, only
150 American troops remain in Iraq.
On Iran, the country that Cohen and his neoconservative
colleagues are currently targeting, the paper states: “U.S. policy
toward Iran must begin with an understanding on Iran’s part that a
military option to deal with their nuclear program remains on the
table.” The paper also slams the “anti-American ‘Bolivarian’ movement
across Latin America” and denounces the Obama administration’s alleged
support for Manuel Zeyala, the Honduran president deposed in a coup in
2009.
All in all, the paper Cohen wrote the foreword to is an ode
to US empire that pines for the Bush administration’s approach to
international affairs. Having an official like Cohen figure so
prominently in the campaign “represents a general refusal to repudiate
the Bush administration's approach to intelligence gathering, its sunny
view of the Iraq war, and its dismissive attitude toward the world
community,” Right Web's Certo said. “It's a heavy nod to the
ancien regime in an issue area that gets little attention from the public.”
2. Dan Senor. Well known for his past role as chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in American-occupied Iraq,
Senor
is closely linked to neoconservative policy circles. He is also
currently a “special adviser” to Romney, and was a senior adviser for
Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. Senor is a co-founder of the
Foreign Policy Initiative, a PNAC-linked group that advocates for US pressure on Iran and a military solution to the crisis in Syria.
Senor has acted as one of Romney’s go-to men on Israel, a
country Senor has close ties with. Senor is a former intern for the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and still has ties to
the lobby group. His sister, Wendy Singer,
runs AIPAC's operations in Israel.
“He'll essentially be a Netanyahu guy inside the White House. He's
going to be the AIPAC enforcer,” MJ Rosenberg, a prolific critic of
AIPAC who used to work for the lobby, told AlterNet. Rosenberg also
worked as chief of staff for Congressman Edward Feighan, D-Ohio while
Senor was an intern there in the early 1990s. “You can't be an American
and be closer to the right-wing part of Israel than Dan Senor is.”
Senor is the co-author of
Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, which lauds Israel’s economic progress while skirting mention of the Israeli occupation--an omission that, as the
Jewish Daily Forward noted, aligned
“nicely with recent public relations efforts by Israel to shift
attention away from its problems and toward its achievements.” Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called Senor and co-author Saul
Singer (Wendy Singer's husband) “perceptive writers,” and
quipped at a 2009 speech
to the Jewish Federations of North America that Israel “is the start-up
nation.” And when Netanyahu wanted to get a message across to Romney
fast--that Netanyahu had played “no role” in billionaire Sheldon
Adelson’s decision to bankroll Newt Gingrich--he relayed a message to
Senor,
according to the New York Times.
Senor is a contributor to various media outlets. In July 2010, before scheduled talks between Obama and Netanyahu,
Senor took to the Daily Beast
to argue that Obama “must reassure Netanyahu” in order to head off a
“train wreck” for Mideast diplomacy. The argument dovetails with the
view pushed by the Israel lobby that there should be no “daylight”
between the US and Israel, and that disagreements on policy should be
aired in private.
In September 2011,
Senor wrote in the Wall Street Journal that
the president had “launched” an “offensive” against Israel after a
March 2010 announcement of new settlements in Jerusalem. In the same
op-ed, he lambasted the State Department for considering Jerusalem, a
city under occupation, separate from Israel proper.
Clearly, Senor’s position is that the US should never put pressure on
Israel, which is exactly the position Romney professes. At a December
2011 debate in Iowa,
Romney stated:
“If we disagree with [Israel], like this president has time and time
again, we don't do it in public like he's done it, we do it in private.
And we let the Israeli leadership describe what they believe the right
course is going forward.”
3. Cofer Black. A former vice-chairman for the private security company Blackwater USA, Black has been involved with the Romney campaign
since 2007, when he came on as a senior adviser on counterterrorism and national security.
Writing in the
Daily Beast, the right-leaning national security reporter
Eli Lake explained that Black was Romney’s
“trusted envoy to the murky world of the U.S. intelligence community
who is also treated like a close political aide.” According to Lake’s
reporting, Black sets up intelligence briefings for Romney from former
CIA officers, and used his contacts in the Egyptian and Israeli
intelligence worlds to debrief Romney on events in the region.
As Lake notes, Black’s claim to fame as a CIA officer is that he did
“much of the street work” that led to the apprehension of Carlos the
Jackal. He was part of the CIA team that tracked bin Laden in the 1990s.
Black, a 28-year CIA veteran who directed the agency’s counter-terror
center from 1999-2002, also served during the Bush administration as
State Department coordinator for counterterrorism, and resigned shortly
after Bush’s 2004 reelection.
According to Jeremy Scahill’s book
Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army,
Black played “an essential role in crafting and implementing the Bush
administration’s counter-terror policies.” Specifically, Black played an
integral part in the use of “extraordinary renditions,” the euphemism
for the Bush administration’s program of kidnapping alleged terrorists
and spiriting them off to secret CIA prisons around the world to be
tortured.
In 2005, Black joined the Blackwater USA team, the well-connected
private security company that has been derided as a “mercenary” group,
as vice chairman. He stayed on until 2008, a year after Blackwater
agents committed the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, an event that
resulted in the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians.
Black's influence on Romney's views on torture is clear. In a 2007
debate, Romney was asked whether water-boarding was torture. His
response was noncommittal, but noted that he gets advice on those
questions “from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for
counter-terrorism in the CIA for some 35 years.” In November 2011,
Romney advisers made clear that the candidate does not believe that water-boarding is torture.
Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and a staff reporter for
Mondoweiss. Follow him on
Twitter @alexbkane.
No comments:
Post a Comment