While the ultimate authority to execute decisions and decide actions based on knowledge of the world is the presidents alone, he or she will act based on the words of the experts surrounding the president.

By looking at what people a presidential candidate surrounds himself (or herself) with, you can get an idea of just what you can expect.

These people will – in case their candidate gets elected - have the ability to exercise an influence over the decisions the president will make that makes the power of the presidency not a power of one man or woman, but rather a shared power.

They represents the ideas and world views, interests and needs, the candidate have “sold out” too along the way and as such they will be rewarded.

Now look at McCain’s entourage.

Or look at what others who has done precisely that have found:

Investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss has written about Senator John McCain’s vision for foreign policy and those around him influencing and reflecting these policies.

If you look at the list of people who say they’re advising the McCain camp, you find a broad range of people. You find people like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Larry Eagleburger. These are the traditional kind of Nixon-era realists, many of whom certainly wouldn’t be considered liberals, but who certainly are realists. But when you look at McCain’s positions, his views on things, you don’t find any of the influence of people like Eagleburger and Scowcroft.

What you see instead is that the rest of McCain’s advisers, and you named several of them—James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has been traveling and campaigning with McCain and who I interviewed for this piece; Bill Kristol, who’s very close to McCain for probably a decade and has been kind of an angel sitting on his shoulder and whispering in his ear all that time; people like Scheunemann; people like Max Boot; Ralph Peters; there’s a long list of people who have joined the McCain advisory team—and it’s these people whom McCain listens to when it comes to foreign policy. He certainly hasn’t expressed anything in any foreign policy area that you would identify with the Republican realist camp. He’s much closer to the neocons[v].

Independent journalist Allan Nairn and American Conservative correspondent Kelley Beaucar Vlahos:

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.

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. Bud McFarlane from the Reagan administration, who was a key backer of the Contras. Brent Scowcroft, who these days is popular with some liberals because he opposes—he opposed the Iraq invasion, who is a leader of the realist school—the realist school basically says, yes, kill civilians, but make sure you win the war, as opposed to the Bush-Cheney school, which has been killing civilians but losing the war, as the US has been doing until recently in Iraq and is now starting to do in Afghanistan—Scowcroft was the one who, during the Bush 1 administration, went to China right after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reassured the Chinese leadership, “Don’t worry about it, we’re still behind you.[vi]”

Concerned? I am

Now you should ask yourself for what interests, to what purposes, and for whose benefit he would use the expanded powers of the US President – powers so extensive that they have made the rule of international law as well as domestic law optional for the president and the executive branch, as long as the war without end continues.

And that, in itself, will be for as long as the president decides.

 1  |  2  |  3  |  4