Greenwald really nails it about the Establishment Foreign Policy Community

[beachmom]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

The foreign policy community

If you haven't already read it, I highly recommend this memo from Samantha Power, a Harvard Professor and top foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama. It is one of the best and potentially most important political documents I have read in some time.

America is plagued by a self-anointed, highly influential, and insular so-called Foreign Policy Community which spans both political parties. They consider themselves Extremely Serious and have a whole litany of decades-old orthodoxies which one must embrace lest one be declared irresponsible, naive and unserious. Most of these orthodoxies are ossified 50-year-old relics from the Cold War, and the rest are designed to place off limits from debate the question of whether the U.S. should continue to act as an imperial force, ruling the world with its superior military power.

Most of the recent "controversies" involving Barack Obama's foreign policy statements -- including his oh-so-shocking statement that it would not make moral or political sense to use tactical nuclear weapons to bomb isolated terrorist camps as well as his willingness to attack Al Qaeda elements inside Pakistan if the Musharraf government refuses (as they did for some time) -- were not "controversial" among the Establishment on the merits. They were "controversial" (and "naive" and "irresponsible") because they breached the protocols and orthodoxies imposed by the Foreign Policy Community governing how we are allowed to talk about these issues.

This was vividly illustrated by the sharpest exchange from last night's debate, where both Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd excoriated Obama for his comments on Pakistan, not on the ground that Obama's statements were wrong on the merits (i.e, not that we should avoid military action inside Pakistan under those circumstances), but instead on the ground that he committed the sin of actually discussing with the American people what our foreign policy would be.

The Foreign Policy Community is more secretive than the Fight Club. .....

Read the whole thing.

[welshTerrier2]

1. excellent article!!

thanks for posting this.

we have candidates running for office who, instead of telling us what their values and beliefs are, expect us to make do with vagueries and personalities and shallowness. frankly, the mass media are no better.

this article's emphasis on secrecy is not unlike the "i won't answer hypotheticals." what a bunch of crap that is. hypothetical questions are an excellent mechanism to allow voters to understand some of the candidate's values and beliefs. "what would you do IF" is a perfectly reasonable question. some candidates, I'll be discrete and not mention her by name, think they're winning hearts and minds by showing how oh-so-clever they are because they won't be trapped into committing themselves to anything. what they aren't committed to is leveling with the voters about where they stand. this is not the way a democracy or our electoral processes should function.

k&r ...

[beachmom]

4. I think Glenn is onto something talking about how they're trapped

in the Cold War. Thing is we did a lot of things wrong during the Cold War. I do not think that era should serve as a model for what we need to be doing now in fighting al Qaeda (I prefer calling it a war with al Qaeda and its affiliates as opposed to the too generic "war on terror"). And government secrecy is a BAD THING all the way around, except for the most sensitve classified info.

[applegrove]

2. Good find.

:D

[beachmom]

3. I think Gary Hart's new foreign policy think tank is an antidote to the

Foreign Policy Community. Check it out:

http://www.americansecurityproject.org/

[killbotfactory]

5. Would those be the same people who backed the Iraq war?

When they would only let the discussion center around fake WMD's and not the other multitude of stupid reasons motivating the invasion?

[beachmom]

6. Yep, including those idiots from the Brookings Institution, who

on a trip sponsored by the U.S. military, came back to say how much "progress" had been made. They were sold by the MSM as "critics of the Iraq War", when in fact, they supported the war.

[welshTerrier2]

7. well, the Brookings Institute and Big Oil

let's not forget Cheney's little energy task force meeting ...

there were two factions pushing for the Iraq invasion ... one was PNAC based ... the other was all about O-I-L ...

check out this link to hear the song below: http://www.rockzilla.net/mp3_7.html

Highway 9
By Eliza Gilkyson

Well, the white god said to the little man
we're gonna fulfill scripture in the holy land
between the Tigris and Euphrates, it's a lot like hell
go on and liberate my people and the o-i-l.

Got your big trucks rollin' down highway 9
put on the armor, it's party time
gonna dance with the devil of our own design
get your big trucks rollin' down highway 9.

So the little man gathered all his chicken-hawks in
and the neo-cons and his daddy's kin
With their own clear channel and a helluva spin
and a white man hidden in a black man's skin.

Big trucks rollin' down highway 9
pulverize the public, it's payback time
who's tax dollar is it? your's and mine
keeps the big trucks rollin' down highway 9.

Well we got caught sleepin at the sentry post
now we're standing toe to toe with what we feared the most
that old father and his son and the unheavenly host
We gotta do what we can and don't give up the ghost
Big trucks rollin' down highway 9
food and water and an Internet line
run to the polls when it comes a time
cause the big trucks rollin' down highway 9.

[ProSense]

8. It's good to know that some are not drinking kool-aid:

O’Hanlon/Pollack Rebuffed By Travel Companion Cordesman: ‘I Did Not See Any Dramatic Change’