Where is Robert Pape? Where is Chuck Hagel? Where is Steve Walt? Didn't we in the Obama movement want these men's ideas in the West Wing? Robert Dreyfuss reports on the nexus of pro-Iraq-war neolibs and neocons who are mobbing up Obama:
Several
top advisers to Obama – including Tony Lake, United Nations
ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle and Dennis Ross, along with
leading Democratic hawks like Richard Holbrooke, close to vice president-elect
Joe Biden or secretary of state-designate Hillary Clinton – have made common
cause with war-minded think-tank hawks at the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and other
hardline institutes.
Last spring, Tony Lake and Susan Rice, for example, took part in a WINEP "2008
Presidential Task Force" study which resulted in a report entitled,
"Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen US-Israel Cooperation on the
Iranian Nuclear Challenge". The Institute, part of the Washington-based Israel
lobby, was founded in coordination with the American-Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), and has been vigorously supporting a confrontation with
Iran. The task force report, issued in June, was overseen by four WINEP
heavyweights: Robert Satloff, WINEP's executive director, Patrick Clawson, its
chief Iran analyst, David Makovsky, a senior fellow, and Dennis Ross, an
adviser to Obama who is also a WINEP fellow.
Endorsed by both Lake and Rice, the report opted for an alarmist view of Iran's
nuclear program and proposed that the next president set up a formal US-Israeli
mechanism for coordinating policy toward Iran (including any future need for
"preventive military action"). It drew attention to Israeli fears that "the
United States may be reconciling itself to the idea of 'living with an Iranian
nuclear bomb'," and it raised the spurious fear that Iran plans to arm
terrorist groups with nuclear weapons.
