Justin Raimondo, the columnist and editorial director of Antiwar.com, has been examining the foreign policy experts advising the most prominent Democratic presidential candidates, and he doesn't like what he sees.  --  "[T]he prospects for finding and fielding a genuine antiwar candidate within the Democratic fold seem almost nil," he wrote on Monday.  --  His focus was a series of policy statements by Derek Chollet, John Edward's chief adviser on Iraq.  --  As is true for the foreign policies of all the Democratic front-runners, Chollet's brand of "centrist foreign policy" is just interventionism with a more friendly face, Raimondo writes.  --  The nature of the Edwards-Chollet connection is not really spelled out by Raimondo.  --  Who, exactly, is Derek Chollet?  --  Jason Horowitz, in an Apr. 16 New York Observer piece cited by Raimondo, calls him "a 36-year-old unpaid advisor and oddly prolific ghostwriter of political autobiographies of State and ambassadors, who is a veteran of Washington think tanks."[2]  --  (The Washington Monthlyhas reported that Chollet worked for Edwards as a foreign policy adviser in 2002-2004.)  --  Horowitz reports that Chollet is one of the Democratic candidates' "Iraq point-people [who] meet monthly at a Washington restaurant for a lunch presided over by former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke," a longtime fixture of the U.S. national security state.  --  Holbrooke is, apparently, Chollet's patron or mentor:  Chollet worked in the State Dept. in his 20s in the Clinton administration, where he was a speechwriter for Richard Holbrooke, and Chollet has made use of his connection with Richard Holbrooke to write The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American Statecraft (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).  --  Chollet has been associated with many other pillars of the U.S. national security state as well.  --  He helped "write the memoirs of two former Secretaries of State, James Baker, and Warren Christopher, and then the speeches and Bosnia memoir of Mr. Holbrooke, who encouraged him to advise Mr. Edwards," according to Horowitz, and has been employed in a number of think tanks since then as while engaging in his bipartisan labors on diplomatic memoirs.  --  Various web sites assert he was "educated" at "Cornell and Columbia"; Chollet's highest degree would appear to be his B.A. in Government and History from Cornell.  --  This has not kept him from being hired at Georgetown to teach "U.S. National Security" in the Security Studies Program of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is the only adjunct faculty member listed without an advanced degree.  --  Chollet is an accommodating sort who avoids offending the Democratic establishment.  --  When asked by CNN about Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-TX 16th), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee (A.A., El Paso Community College, 1977), who had been asked by Congressional Quarterly whether al-Qaeda is Sunni or Shia and had replied "Predominantly — probably Shiite," Chollet defended him as "a smart guy who probably just got tripped up."  --  Chollet's wife is a 33-year-old attorney described last year by Washingtonian.com as one of the the capital's top 52 divorce lawyers....

1.

Behind the headlines

DEMOCRATIC ILLUSIONS
By Justin Raimondo

** Foreign policy advisers to the 'big three' Democrats bode ill for antiwar movement **

Antiwar.com
April 16, 2007

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10821

Anyone who had illusions about the Democratic Party as the electoral vehicle of choice for the antiwar movement has got to be dispirited by the "big three" presidential wannabes: John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. None have come out clearly and unequivocally for withdrawal from Iraq, and all refuse to rule out military action against Iran. The situation appears even worse when we look at who's advising them when it comes to foreign policy. A recent cover piece in the New York Observer throws the spotlight on these otherwise obscure (yet important) figures -- hat tip: Matt Yglesias -- and the result isn't pretty.

The "Iraq-eteers" are a "collegial" group, we are told, and, while there are differences of emphasis, all fit within the parameters of conventional liberal internationalism -- of the sort that got us into Vietnam and will help keep us in Iraq. Particularly disappointing for principled opponents of interventionism is one Derek Chollet, co-founder of the Center for a New American Security, which advocates a "centrist foreign policy," i.e., interventionism, but with less melodramatic flair than the neoconservatives over at the Project for a New American Century.

As an introduction to Chollet's views, I would point to this post on DemocracyArsenal.org, the cyber-headquarters of the "national-security Democrats," who keep themselves busy coming up with alternatives to simply withdrawing from Iraq -- and who were too "responsible" (that is, intimidated by Republican chest-beating) to oppose the war outright. "Time," Chollet warns, "is running out":

"The hard-line mullahs and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad show little sign that they are interested in bargaining for anything less than an independent nuclear capability. They are on a collision course with the rest of the world -- and rather than sensing trouble, they seem to relish the situation."

No mention that the Iranians approached the U.S. government in 2003 with the prospect of negotiations for a comprehensive settlement to all outstanding issues between the U.S. and Tehran, even offering to give up some of Osama bin Laden's relatives (including a son), in exchange for some indication of Washington's willingness to engage. By dropping the context of U.S.-Iranian relations and negating the sad history of American intransigence, Chollet makes it appear as if the Iranians are solely to blame. But that isn't true. Another aspect of the Iranian-U.S. relationship Chollet fails to mention is the lack of any centralized command-and-control when it comes to Iranian foreign policy: various agencies and factions within the government pursue differing and often competing agendas. To hear Chollet tell it, however, one would think the hard-liners in Iran are in total control. Again, it just isn't true.

Diplomacy, avers Chollet, is all well and good, but those hardheaded Iranians -- who stubbornly insist they have as much right to develop nuclear energy as any other nation on earth, including the U.S. and Israel -- are not caving: "That's why the military options are being discussed in Washington. While a U.S. military campaign remains highly unlikely, the fact it is even being considered is a reflection of how desperate -- and dangerous -- this crisis has become."

Yes, there's "still room for creative diplomacy," but Chollet believes the prospects for war -- a war he clearly thinks would be justified -- loom rather large at the moment: "There is the problem of time. We face a cold reality: Better policies perfectly executed might not work before Iran has developed nuclear weapons. So while we must hold the line that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable, the limited options before us require clear-headed thinking about living in a world with a nuclear Iran. It's not just prevention we have to worry about; it's containment and deterrence.

"A nuclear Iran would fundamentally alter the strategic chessboard in the Middle East, and spark a regional Cold War. The West would have to make clear the consequences of any use of Iran's weapons, and should explore offering security guarantees to Iran's most likely targets, like Israel and, perhaps someday, a peaceful and democratic Iraq. . . . The consequences of Iran going nuclear are so serious that we must be placing far more energy now in a solution to stop it. But given our limited options for doing so -- and the real likelihood that whatever we do, the Iranian regime is not persuadable -- responsible governance requires that we begin to prepare for the worst."

Why is a nuclear Iran "unacceptable" to the U.S.? Yes, surely one can see how the Israeli government would strike such a stance, but how, exactly, is America threatened by the prospect of Iranian nukes? We lived with a nuclear-armed Soviet Union for almost half a century. Pakistan has nukes, as does India -- and Israel. The principle of deterrence has worked pretty effectively with them over the years, and there is no reason why it shouldn't function in much the same way where the mullahs are concerned. In any case, there can be no disarmament of Iran until the entire Middle East is turned into a nuclear-free zone. I wouldn't hold my breath, however, for the Israelis to go along with that. After all, they won't even officially acknowledge they have nukes, let alone sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Iran, on the other hand, is a signatory.)

It's funny how the U.S. didn't object to Iran's nuclear program when the shah was touting it as evidence of his country's entry into modernity. We helped them build it every step of the way, until the Iranians overthrew the widely hated monarch and set up the current regime. Now they're finishing what the shah started. That's called "blowback," as Chalmers Johnson explained in his classic book of the same title, a backlash generated by our interventionist foreign policy. After being targeted by the president of the United States as a member of the infamous "axis of evil," is it any surprise that Iran is intent on developing a nuclear capacity? This is the crucial context in which Iran's actions take place, but you wouldn't know that from listening to Chollet.

The idea that Iranian possession of nuclear weapons would necessarily have to mean a regional war is odd coming from someone who clearly believes such a war might be necessary in order to ensure Iran doesn't cross the nuclear threshold. Should we go to war in order to prevent a war? This hardly makes either moral or military sense. Again, there may be interests in the region that would stand to lose if Tehran goes nuclear -- Israel, for one, would lose its nuclear monopoly, and the Sunni nations, already nervous on account of Shi'ite revivalism, would be put on edge -- but there is no clear reason why the U.S. has so much at stake as to launch a preemptive strike.

Security guarantees for Israel are a bad idea: under the rubric of such an agreement, we could find U.S. troops deployed in Lebanon or even the occupied territories. The irony of offering security guarantees to the Iraqi state, even as it decomposes into its constituent ethno-religious components due to our actions, is likely not lost on Iraqi nationalists. Iraq does need security guarantees of a sort, however -- to restrain its U.S. and British occupiers, who remain immune from Iraqi law and whose presence is overwhelmingly opposed by the Iraqi people.

Chollet tells us to "prepare for the worst" -- and, if Edwards gets into the White House, we may have to. With Bush and the other Republicans, at least we know what we're getting: perpetual war. When it comes to the Democrats, however, we run into the danger of thinking we are getting a foreign policy based on sweet reason when what we're in for is the same old interventionist crap. These people sit around in their offices every day thinking up new ways to meddle in the affairs of foreign peoples. They are perpetually "concerned" about this "crisis" or that "turning point," and they are constantly warning us that "time is running out." Unless "we" -- meaning the U.S. government -- do something, the world as we know it will end.

That is a delusion, of course, and a dangerous one, but there you have it: it's the culture of the Washington policy wonks, who assume government action is the solution to each and every problem, both nationally and internationally. To these little lords of creation, there is no problem they can't come up with a government-funded solution to. Skepticism about the limits (or morality) of American power abroad is limited to "far left" commentators such as Noam Chomsky and Alex Cockburn, or Republican "realists" such as John Mearsheimer and Andrew Bacevich. Self-proclaimed "centrists" of the Edwards-Chollet variety are always interventionists.

It is telling that Chollet is the foreign policy voice of the most ostensibly "antiwar" of all the Democratic candidates, John Edwards. I'll cover the others in future editions of this column, but suffice to say at this point that the prospects for finding and fielding a genuine antiwar candidate within the Democratic fold seem almost nil.

2.

Politics

THE IRAQ-ETEERS
By Jason Horowitz

** Nine Candidates Need to Gin Up Stances on War; Democratic Wonks Lunching With Dick Holbrooke, McCain Aide Recoils at Mitt Message; Rudy Asks Bolton **

New York Observer
April 16, 2007

http://www.observer.com/20070416/20070416_Jason_Horowitz_pageone_coverstory1.asp

John McCain has yet to criticize any of his Republican opponents directly for their positions on Iraq. As for his staff, that’s another story.

Mr. McCain’s go-to Iraq expert says, for example, that he couldn’t believe his ears when Mitt Romney recently told ABC’s "Good Morning America" that he supports “timetables and milestones” for the Iraq government to meet, but ones that “shouldn’t be for public pronouncement.”

Mr. McCain “does not believe in timetables or deadlines, secret or otherwise,” said the advisor, Randy Scheunemann. “He has made it clear that setting a timetable or deadline is nothing more than setting a date certain for surrender.”

Mr. Scheunemann, a former president of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and advisor to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, sounded equally unimpressed with some recent comments from Rudy Giuliani, who told reporters last week that President Bush and the Democrats in Congress should reach a compromise over Iraq funding legislation that includes dates of withdrawal.

“Frankly, it does not make a lot of sense talking about negotiations in advance of the President even having a bill on his desk,” he said.

While primary voters in both parties have had a difficult time discerning and keeping track of the different attitudes of the candidates toward the war in Iraq, it is staff-level Iraq advisors like Mr. Scheunemann who provide the best guide to the distinctions between the various camps.

On the Democratic side, their Iraq point-people meet monthly at a Washington restaurant for a lunch presided over by former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The assembled foreign-policy wonks all know each other and get along -- to an extent.

“It’s a very collegial group,” said Antony Blinken, 44, senior advisor to Senator Joe Biden in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee office, who served as the principal advisor to President Clinton on U.S. relations with Europe and NATO. “Obviously, there are some distinctions on Iraq.”

The attendees of those gatherings tend to state those differences at least as plainly as the candidates do.

Mr. Blinken, who has helped Mr. Biden fine-tune his controversial proposal to devolve powers to autonomous Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish ethnic regions, makes a point of saying that none of the other campaigns have done as much.

“What’s the alternative? No one has one,” said Mr. Blinken, who argued that the Iraqi Constitution actually called for the federalist system that Mr. Biden was proposing. “It’s in the Iraqi Constitution, but he is the only one who has bothered to read it.”

But the Democratic front-runners have distinguished themselves in other ways.

THE BIG THREE

John Edwards’ representative at the lunches, for example, advocates the withdrawal of as many as 50,000 combat troops from Iraq within the next three months and favors revoking the war’s authorization and funding.

His guru is Derek Chollet, a 36-year-old unpaid advisor and oddly prolific ghostwriter of political autobiographies of State and ambassadors, who is a veteran of Washington think tanks.

Mr. Chollet recently helped found the Center for a New American Security, whose first mission has been identifying how many American troops it would take to prevent what it calls “the three no’s”: stopping Al Qaeda from gaining a foothold in Iraq, keeping a civil war from spilling across Iraq’s borders, and avoiding genocide. He has been advising Mr. Edwards since 2002, after helping write the memoirs of two former Secretaries of State, James Baker, and Warren Christopher, and then the speeches and Bosnia memoir of Mr. Holbrooke, who encouraged him to advise Mr. Edwards.

“There was a pragmatism about him that I found attractive,” said Mr. Chollet, adding that he talked “a lot” with Mr. Edwards as the candidate developed his Iraq policy.

He thinks that the candidate is much more solid now on matters of foreign policy, an area seen as his weakness in the 2004 election. “Now I’m hard-pressed to think that there is any issue he could get asked about in a town hall or Meet the Press setting that could be a stumper,” he said.

Barack Obama, whose lack of foreign-policy experience puts him in danger of being this year’s John Edwards, is represented at the meetings by Senate staffer Mark Lippert, 34, whom Mr. Obama poached from the Senate appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations.

Mr. Lippert talks about Mr. Obama’s plan as a somewhat flexible (critics would say vague) set of goals: the withdrawal of an unspecified number of troops starting May 1 and of all combat troops by next March, but with the possibility of 90-day tour extensions as rewards to the Iraqi government if it starts meeting long-drawn deadlines for progress.

“We are not dictating troop levels; we are dictating the overall goal,” said Mr. Lippert.

“All the deadlines are flexible if they reach benchmarks,” he added. “The goals are achievable."

And then there’s Hillary Clinton’s day-to-day policy advisor on Iraq, Andrew Shapiro, 39, who is her Senate office’s senior defense and foreign-policy advisor. He worked for the hawkish Senator Joseph Lieberman in the 2000 Presidential campaign, and before that he was a lawyer with the Washington, D.C., law firm Covington & Burling.

“We agree more broadly that the Bush administration has been a disaster,” Mr. Shapiro said of his fellow advisors. “At the same time, we are loyal to our bosses, we’re all professionals, and we’re all there to help our bosses to the best of our abilities.”

Mr. Shapiro arguably has the hardest job of any of the advisors, not only because he is constantly in grave danger of being big-footed by his candidate’s uniquely heavy network of Democratic foreign-policy establishmentarians, but also because he is charged with helping to shape what is the most difficult Iraq War plan of any of the candidates.

Mrs. Clinton has shied away from setting a hard deadline, although she has said that all combat troops could, under ideal circumstances, come back home by the end of President Bush’s term. Like Mr. Obama, she favors the creation of benchmarks to measure the shifting of responsibility to Iraq’s security forces and fair distribution of oil revenues, but she is alone in proposing a cutoff of money to Iraqi security forces as a way to force the Iraqi government to make political progress.

“The only way it is going to change is to exert leverage that they will understand,” said Mr. Shapiro.

Not all of the campaigns have taken a seat at the Holbrooke foreign-policy table.

“I’m not a professional Washington insider -- I’m a college professor,” said Michael Contarino, a political-science professor at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester, who advises Governor Bill Richardson on Iraq affairs.

Mr. Contarino, 52, has been drafting a new multilateral foreign-policy doctrine that he and Mr. Richardson call “the new realism,” and he is decidedly less inhibited than the other experts in assessing the Iraq policies of the Democratic candidates.

“It’s certainly different from Hillary’s,” he said of Mr. Richardson’s plan. “In a nutshell, we need to get out. Our continued presence in Iraq is not making things better. We are stuck in the middle of a civil war.”

Of Mrs. Clinton, he said: “She does seem to be unclear what her own position is here.” And of Mr. Obama: “I think he has been a little bit vague about this. He never had any foreign-policy experience. I’m not surprised he hasn’t been particularly detailed in his comments.”

A LOOSER UNION OF REPUBLICANS

For all their differences, the Iraq experts on the Democratic side are a veritable supper club compared with the Republican campaigns.

It’s not that the Republicans disagree on principle -- they all disdain the advocacy of troop withdrawals by Democrats as tantamount to a calamitous defeat for America -- but rather that only one of them, Mr. McCain, seems to be offering any substantive alternative to White House policy at all.

In fact, it’s hard to tell whom the other leading Republican candidates are getting their advice from.

Mr. Giuliani has criticized some aspects of the American performance in Iraq, but has basically supported the President’s plan without addressing its specific shortcomings. Asked about his day-to-day Iraq advisor, his campaign would only say that he speaks with many individuals, including retired Gen. Jack Keane and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

Mr. Romney’s campaign also offered advisors -- former Representative Vin Weber and former Senator Jim Talent -- but could not point to one specific Iraq advisor.

(Romney campaign spokesman Kevin Madden said that Mr. Scheunemann’s remarks on the ABC interview were “an obvious and blatant distortion of Governor Romney’s position,” saying that Mr. Romney wasn’t talking about withdrawal timetables and that he has “been very clear in advocating metrics and milestones that measure steps toward success in Iraq.”)

By contrast, Mr. McCain -- whose big-name advisors include Henry Kissinger -- has a more straightforward message articulated, for better or worse, by Mr. Scheunemann.

In an echo of Mr. McCain’s sunny (and much-criticized) assessment of security after a recent, heavily sanitized tour of Baghdad, Mr. Scheunemann argued that the increase in troops that Mr. McCain supports is vital to achieving any sort of political and economic progress within Iraq.

While Mr. McCain’s poll numbers have dipped in part because of his support for the unpopular war, Mr. Scheunemann says that there are signs of cautious optimism in Iraq, and that Mr. McCain’s recent meeting with Sunni sheiks in the embattled Anbar province represents “a fundamental change, and possibly a strategic shift, in the fight against Al Qaeda.”

“He will stick with this as long as possible,” said Mr. Scheunemann. “He means it with every fiber of his being that he would rather lose a campaign than lose a war.”