Behind the next throne . . .

If there is one thing that we can learn from the Bush administration it is that often times the people behind the throne are just as important as the one on it. Think Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith and on and on . . .

Well Professor Stephen Zunes has been kind enough to break down the foreign policy people in both the Clinton and Obama campaigns:

Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors tend to be veterans of President Bill Clinton’s administration, most notably former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. Her most influential advisor – and her likely choice for Secretary of State – is Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke served in a number of key roles in her husband’s administration, including U.S. ambassador to the UN and member of the cabinet, special emissary to the Balkans, assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs, and U.S. ambassador to Germany. He also served as President Jimmy Carter’s assistant secretary of state for East Asia in propping up Marcos in the Philippines, supporting Suharto’s repression in East Timor, and backing the generals behind the Kwangju massacre in South Korea.

Senator Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisers, who on average tend to be younger than those of the former first lady, include mainstream strategic analysts who have worked with previous Democratic administrations, such as former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig. They have also included some of the more enlightened and creative members of the Democratic Party establishment, such as Joseph Cirincione and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress, and former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. His team also includes the noted human rights scholar and international law advocate Samantha Power – author of a recent New Yorker article on U.S. manipulation of the UN in post-invasion Iraq – and other liberal academics. Some of his advisors, however, have particularly poor records on human rights and international law, such as retired General Merrill McPeak, a backer of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, and Dennis Ross, a supporter of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

I have predicted in the past (nostrajohnus) that Barack Obama would be the next President. I have been somewhat disappointed in his muted opposition to the war in Iraq while a Senator. That being said I have clung to the shred of hope that Obama is actually a bit more progressive than he lets on, and that he is just coming off hawkish in an attempt to mollify the powerful political and economic interests that might oppose him otherwise. The analysis of his foreign policy team gives me a bit more reason to hope.

You can read the rest of the article over at GlobalResearch.ca