Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman wrote of Clinton's second-term secretary of state Madeleine Albright that for her foreign policy was a quiz where the answer was always bombs.
The Obama White House's choice for Director of National Intelligence was retired four-star Navy admiral Dennis Blair, who is a former associate CIA director for military support with a doctorate degree in Russian studies from Oxford University, which he attended at the same time as Bill Clinton and his roommate Strobe Talbott, another Russia hand who currently heads up the Brookings Institution.
After stepping down from his post in the Navy, Blair and James Jones served together on the Project for National Security Reform which is in the words of its website "carrying out one of the most comprehensive studies of the U.S. national security system in American history."
(His new role will complement that of the abrasive and insufferable Richard Holbrooke as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan where he is overseeing the expansion of the US's South Asian, and NATO's first ground and first Asian, war.)
Gration's history as an Air Force pilot includes 1,000 hours of combat and combat support time in 274 combat missions over Iraq.
For years Hillary Clinton has been demanding the creation of an Iraq-type no-fly zone over the Darfur region of Western Sudan - under NATO command - and Gration seems just the person to put the plan into effect.
What such an initiative might result in is indicated by recalling that Clinton's spouse bombed Iraq regularly for all eight years of his tenure and once, according to the Iraqi government at the time, even damaged the tomb of St. Matthew the Apostle near Mosul.
Regarding James Jones, Dennis Blair and now J. Scott Gration and their new roles, the appointments of former EUCOM and NATO chief commander Alexander Haig as the Reagan administration's first secretary of state and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell to the same position in the first George W. Bush White House rightly raised concerns about the militarization of US foreign policy.
Now three former top career military officers - a Marine general, an Air Force general and a Navy admiral - are playing crucial roles in the new administration's policies.
Just as the Obama administration insisted on retaining Bush appointee Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, so Gates has announced that he will keep Navy Admiral Mike Mullen on as chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Two weeks ago Mullen offered to assist counterinsurgency war efforts in Mexico; in the words of a Reuters account of his statement "The US military is ready to help Mexico in its deadly war against drug cartels with some of the same counter-insurgency tactics used against militant networks in Iraq and Afghanistan."
In Mullen's own words "They [Mexican authorities] need intelligence support, capabilities and tactics that have evolved for us in our fight against networks in the terrorist world. There are an awful lot of similarities."
Mullen also drew a parallel between the nearly nine-year-old Plan Colombia program initiated by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright - supposedly a drug eradication initiative but in fact a ruthless death squad-linked counterinsurgency war - and his plans for Mexico. The Bush administration had previously deployed Colombian military and security personnel to Afghanistan in an earlier effort to replicate Plan Colombia's putative success in Asia.
As though Pakistan with a population of 172,000,000 and Mexico with 110,000,000 were not enough for the Pentagon to contend with, North Korea and the world's most populous nation, China, have also been added to its list.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
