Rmoney 2012
the neo-con militarist choice
Project for a New American Century (PNAC) members are Romney's foreign policy team
Mitt Romney believes in recycling -- recycling neo-con warmongers as advisors to his 2012 campaign. Team Romney includes co-authors of the Project for a New American Century infamous report saying a "new Pearl Harbor" would facilitate their military plans.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/mitt-romney-announces-foreign-policy-team-171303969.html
Mitt Romney announces his foreign policy team
By Laura Rozen | The Envoy – Thu, Oct 6, 2011
In a move to highlight his national security credentials in the GOP presidential race, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has publicized a new roster of campaign advisers working on foreign policy and defense issues. The announcement comes ahead of a major foreign policy speech that Romney is scheduled to deliver at the Citadel military college in South Carolina on Friday.
The new team, which the Romney campaign listed in a PR announcement to the press on Thursday, draws heavily on Republicans with mainstream policy credentials--a clear point of continuity with the playbook the Romney campaign has adopted in domestic, social and economic policy. The list features few advisers affiliated with the more aggressively hawkish or isolationist wings of the party--but the exceptions are notable.
Not surprisingly, the list leans heavily on veterans of past Republican White Houses. Here, for example, is a partial list of some of the more prominent former Bush White House hands now working on the Romney foreign policy team: former CIA Director Michael Hayden, former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, former State Department Policy Planning Chief and North Korea expert Mitchell Reiss. The roster of George W, Bush veterans also include Robert Joseph and Stephen Rademaker, who both served as under secretaries of State for international security and arms control; former Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky; former State Department envoy on war crimes Pierre Prosper, former spokesman for the U.S. viceroy in Iraq Dan Senor; and former CIA counter terrorism chief turned Blackwater executive Cofer Black.
Advising Romney on Afghanistan and Pakistan: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Ashley Tellis, and former Bush-era Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs James Shinn. On Asia: former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Evan Feigenbaum, now affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations. On Defense: former Reagan Navy Secretary John Lehman and Roger Zakheim.
Among those advising Romney on the Middle East: former Bush deputy National Security Adviser on Iraq adviser Meghan O'Sullivan, and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Mary Beth Long.
However, some Washington Middle East experts have already flagged Lebanese-American scholar Walid Phares as a controversial co-chair of the Romney Mideast team.
"Walid Phares is advising Romney on Middle East policy? For realz? That's terrifying + not just because of [Lebanese Forces] LF history," George Washington University Middle East expert Marc Lynch wrote on Twitter, referring to Phares' past reported role with the right-wing Lebanese Christian militia during that country's civil war. "To be clear: I have nothing against Gov. Romney," the Center for New American Security's Andrew Exum similarly wrote at Twitter. "But appointing Walid Phares your M.E. advisor is NUTS." Phares, now affiliated with the National Defense University, was an outspoken advocate of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and of a hawkish Middle Eastern policy during the Bush years.
The region is the subject of such American national security preoccupation given the nearly 40,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, the Iran nuclear issue, the stalemated Israeli Palestinian peace process and the Arab spring revolutions that have convulsed the region the past year.
Meanwhile, a key Romney nonproliferation adviser, the Heritage Foundation's Kim Holmes, has opposed American ratification of the U.S.-Russian START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which has been overwhelmingly supported by lawmakers from both parties going back to Reagan. The Senate ratified the new START accord last December.
Also advising Romney: Brookings foreign policy scholar Robert Kagan, former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Kristin Silverberg, former Assistant Secretary of State for non proliferation Stephen Rademaker, two former Bush-era U.S. ambassadors to Brazil (John Danilovich and Clifford Sobel), former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) and former Rep. Jim Talent (R-Mo.).
You can read the full (and quite long) list or Romney advisers below the jump
Special Advisers and Co-Chairs of regional and functional working groups are listed below. Titles and affiliations are for identification purposes only.
SPECIAL ADVISERS
Cofer Black
Christopher Burnham
Michael Chertoff
Eliot Cohen
Norm Coleman
John Danilovich
Paula Dobriansky
Eric Edelman
Michael Hayden
Kerry Healey
Kim Holmes
Robert Joseph
Robert Kagan
John Lehman
Walid Phares
Pierre Prosper
Mitchell Reiss
Daniel Senor
Jim Talent
Vin Weber
Richard Williamson
Dov Zakheim
WORKING GROUPS
Afghanistan & Pakistan
James Shinn, Co-Chair
Ashley Tellis, Co-Chair
Africa
Tibor Nagy, Chair
Asia-Pacific
Evan Feigenbaum, Co-Chair
Aaron Friedberg, Co-Chair
Kent Lucken, Co-Chair
Counter-Proliferation
Eric Edelman, Co-Chair
Robert Joseph, Co-Chair
Stephen Rademaker, Co-Chair
Counterterrorism/Intelligence
Michael Chertoff, Co-Chair
Michael Hayden, Co-Chair
Defense
John Lehman, Co-Chair
Roger Zakheim, Co-Chair
Europe
Nile Gardiner, Co-Chair
Kristen Silverberg, Co-Chair
Human Rights
Pierre Prosper, Chair
International Assistance
Grant Aldonas, Co-Chair
Daniel Runde, Co-Chair
International Organizations
Christopher Burnham, Co-Chair
Paula Dobriansky, Co-Chair
Robert O'Brien, Co-Chair
Latin America
Clifford Sobel, Co-Chair
Ray Walser, Co-Chair
Middle East & North Africa
Mary Beth Long, Co-Chair
Meghan O'Sullivan, Co-Chair
Walid Phares, Co-Chair
Russia
Leon Aron, Co-Chair
William Martel, Co-Chair
SPECIAL ADVISERS
Cofer Black
Vice President of Blackbird Technologies; Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (1999-2002); United States Department of State Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism (2002-2004)
Christopher Burnham
Vice Chairman of Deutsche Bank Asset Management; United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Management (2005-2006); United States Under Secretary of State for Management (2001-2005)
Chairman of the Chertoff Group; United States Secretary of Homeland Security (2005-2009); Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (2003-2005)
Eliot Cohen
Director of the Strategic Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University; Counselor to the United States Department of State (2007-2009); Defense Policy Advisory Board Member (2001-2009)
Norm Coleman
Chairman of the Board, American Action Network; Adviser to the Republican Jewish Coalition; United States Senator (R-MN) (2003-2009)
John Danilovich
Member of the Trilantic European Advisory Council; CEO of Millennium Challenge Corporation (2005-2009); Ambassador to Brazil (2004-2005); Ambassador to Costa Rica (2001-2004)
Paula Dobriansky
Senior Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs (2001-2009)
Eric Edelman
Visiting Scholar at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2005-2009); Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs (2001-2003)
Michael Hayden
Principal of the Chertoff Group; Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2009); Director of the National Security Agency (1999-2005)
Kerry Healey
President, Friends of the Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan; Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts (2003-2007); Trustee, American University of Afghanistan
Kim Holmes
Vice President of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation; Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (2001-2005)
Robert Joseph
Senior Scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy; Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (2005-2007)
Robert Kagan
Syndicated Columnist; Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in the Center on United States and Europe; Board Member of the Foreign Policy Initiative
John Lehman
Chairman and Founding Partner, J. F. Lehman & Co.; National Security Advisory Counsel for the Center for Security Policy; Secretary of the Navy (1981-1987); Member of the 9/11 Commission
Walid Phares
Professor of Global Strategies at the National Defense University in Washington; Member of the Advisory Board of the Task Force on Future Terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security (2006-2007)
Pierre Prosper
Partner at Arent Fox; United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues (2001-2005); Special Counsel and Policy Adviser to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues (1999-2001)
Mitchell Reiss
President of Washington College; Director of Policy Planning at State Department (2001-2005); Special Envoy for Northern Ireland (2005-2007)
Daniel Senor
Partner at Rosemont Capital; Coalition Provisional Authority Spokesman and Senior Advisor (2003-2004); Director and Co-Founder, Foreign Policy Initiative
Jim Talent
Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation; United States Senator (R-MO) (2002-2007)
Vin Weber
Managing Partner, Clark & Weinstock; Member of the United States House of Representatives (R-MN) (1981-1993)
Richard Williamson
Partner at Winston & Strawn; United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (2004); Special Envoy to Sudan (2008-2009); Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (1988-1989)
Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) (2001-2004); Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Planning and Resources (1985-1987)
WORKING GROUP CHAIRS AND CO-CHAIRS
Afghanistan & Pakistan
James Shinn, Co-Chair
Lecturer at Princeton University; Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs (2007-2008)
Ashley Tellis, Co-Chair
Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Senior Adviser to the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (2003)
Africa
Tibor Nagy, Chair
Vice Provost for International Affairs at Texas Tech University; Ambassador to Ethiopia (1999-2002); Ambassador to Guinea (1996-1999)
Asia-Pacific
Evan Feigenbaum, Co-Chair
Executive Director of the Paulson Institute; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia (2006-2009); Member for East Asia, Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff (2001-2006)
Aaron Friedberg, Co-Chair
Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University; Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs and Director of Policy Planning, Office of the Vice President (2003-2005)
Kent Lucken, Co-Chair
Director at Citigroup Private Bank in Boston; Former Foreign Service Officer; Board Member for the US-Asia Institute
Counter-Proliferation
Eric Edelman, Co-Chair
Visiting Scholar at School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University; Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (2005-2009); Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs (2001-2003)
Robert Joseph, Co-Chair
Senior Scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy; Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security (2005-2007)
Stephen Rademaker, Co-Chair
Principal at Podesta Group; Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation (2002-2006); Policy Director for National Security Affairs and Senior Counsel to Senator Bill Frist (2006-2007)
Counterterrorism & Intelligence
Michael Chertoff, Co-Chair
Chairman of the Chertoff Group; Secretary of Homeland Security (2005-2009); Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit (2003-2005)
Michael Hayden, Co-Chair
Principal of the Chertoff Group; Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006-2009); Director of the National Security Agency (1999-2005)
Defense
John Lehman, Co-Chair
Chairman and Founding Partner, J.F. Lehman & Co.; National Security Advisory Council for the Center for Security Policy; Secretary of the Navy (1981-1987); Member of the 9/11 Commission
Roger Zakheim, Co-Chair
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (2008-2009)
Europe
Nile Gardiner, Co-Chair
Director of the Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom; Foreign Policy Researcher for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (2000-2002)
Kristen Silverberg, Co-Chair
Chief Operating Officer at Vorbeck Materials; Ambassador to the European Union (2008-2009); Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs (2005-2008)
Human Rights
Pierre Prosper, Chair
Partner at Arent Fox; United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues (2001-2005); Special Counsel and Policy Adviser to the Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues (1999-2001)
International Assistance
Grant Aldonas, Co-Chair
Senior Adviser at Center for Strategic and International Studies; Under Secretary for International Trade at the Commerce Department (2001-2005); Member of the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (2001-2005)
Daniel Runde, Co-Chair
Director of Prosperity and Development at Center for Strategic and International Studies; Former Director of the Office of Global Development Alliances at USAID (2005-2007); Head of Philanthropy Relations at the International Finance Corporation (2007-2010)
International Organizations
Christopher Burnham, Co-Chair
Vice Chairman Deutsche Bank Asset Management; United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Management (2005-2006); United States Under Secretary of State for Management (2001-2005)
Paula Dobriansky, Co-Chair
Senior Fellow at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government; Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs (2001-2009)
Robert O'Brien, Co-Chair
Partner at Arent Fox; US Alternate Representative to the 60th session of the United Nations General Assembly (2005-2006); Former legal officer with the United Nations Security Council (Compensation Commission) (2006-2008)
Latin America
Clifford Sobel, Co-Chair
Ambassador to Brazil (2006-2009); Ambassador to the Netherlands (2001-2005); Member United States Holocaust Memorial Council (1994-1998)
Ray Walser, Co-Chair
Senior Policy Analyst at the Heritage Foundation; Director of the Foreign Service Institute's Western Hemisphere Area Studies program (2005-2007); 27-year Foreign Service Officer
Middle East & North Africa
Mary Beth Long, Co-Chair
Senior Vice President at Neural IQ Government Services; Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (2007-2009)
Meghan O'Sullivan, Co-Chair
Lecturer at Kennedy School of Government; Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan (2004-2007)
Walid Phares, Co-Chair
Professor of Global Strategies at the National Defense University in Washington; Member of the Advisory Board of the Task Force on Future Terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security (2006-2007)
Russia
Leon Aron, Co-Chair
Resident Scholar and Director of Russian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; Author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life and other noted works; Contributed to The New Russian Foreign Policy
William Martel, Co-Chair
Associate Professor of International Security Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University
http://news.antiwar.com/2011/10/07/romney-makes-belligerent-foreign-policy-speech/
Romney Calls for a Century of American Dominance
Romney's belligerent foreign policy speech struggled to suggest a difference between Bush, Obama, and himself
by John Glaser, October 07, 2011
Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney made his first major foreign policy speech Friday at The Citadel, a military college in the important primary state of South Carolina. Full of pomp and belligerence, he called for a century of American dominance.
"This century must be an American century. In an American century, America has the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world," Romney said. "God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers. America must lead the world, or someone else will."
Romney condemned what he called an isolationist tendency from the tea party conservatives and other Republicans that dare dissent from the pro-war ideology of the party.
"This is America's moment. We should embrace the challenge, not shrink from it, not crawl into an isolationist shell, not wave the white flag of surrender, nor give in to those who assert America's moment has passed. That is utter nonsense," he proclaimed.
Romney criticized President Obama's so-called "aggressive" withdrawal from Afghanistan and promised to respond to calls for cutting the defense budget by ramping up military spending and expanding US military presence around the world. Giving paranoid Republican voters what they wanted to hear, he ignored the fact that the ten year war in Afghanistan has gone on ten years too long and that America could cut its defense spending in half and still outspend every other country in the world.
This speech coincides with the announcement that Romney's new foreign policy advisor is Walid Phares, a Lebanese-American, Fox News contributor, and rising Republican pundit known for his hawkishness.
The unmitigated militarism espoused by the famously duplicitous Romney is stale, even by American standards. He is trying to rally over-extended imperial sentiment in order to counter war weariness and (probably inaccurate) fears of a declining US hegemony.
He appealed more to vague sentiments and perceptions of complaisance on the international stage than to actual changes in policy. After all, it is difficult to present a starkly different option than Obama, who has followed essentially the same foreign policy as the most militaristic Republican president in recent memory, George W. Bush.
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/07/romneys_scary_middle_east_advisor/
Romney's scary Middle East advisor
The three careers of Walid Phares: Lebanese militant, pro-Israeli propagandist, and Fox News pundit
By As`ad AbuKhalil
Mitt Romney has a new foreign policy adviser. His name is Walid Phares, a Lebanese -American contributor to Fox News, and rising star in Republican punditry. Phares has had three careers and all are relevant in bizarre ways to the U.S. presidential campaign.
Phares' first career began early in the Lebanese civil war of the 1975-1990 when he allied himself with the right-wing militias, armed and financed by Israel. In his official curriculum vitae, Phares describes himself as a writer and lawyer in Lebanon at this time but he was more and less than that. He assumed a political position in the hierarchy of the militias and founded a small Christian party in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
After Genral Michel Auon assumed the presidency of Lebanon in 1988, Phares joined the right-wing coalition known as the Lebanese Front, which consisted of various sectarian groupings and militia. The Front backed Gen. Auon in his struggles against the Syrian regime of Hafez al-Assad and the Muslims of Lebanon. Phares's role was not small, according to Beirut newspaper accounts.. He served as vice chair of another front's political leadership committee, headed by a man named Etienne Saqr, whose Guardians of Cedar militia voiced the slogan "Kill a Palestinian and you shall enter Heaven." (Saqr later moved to Israel, and then Cyprus.) The Front was also backed by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a bitter foe of the Syrians. It seems unlikely that Romney knew much about this chapter in Phares' career when he tapped him as an advisor.
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As`ad AbuKhalil is professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and Research Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of "Bin Ladin and Taliban: The New American War Against Terrorism" More As`ad AbuKhalil
Friday, Oct 7, 2011 3:43 PM CDT
Romney foreign policy: Bush 2.0
The GOP frontrunner is putting the band back together, tapping the team that brought us two wars
By Joan Walsh
Mitt Romney is proving he's the establishment Republican in the race by doing what establishment leaders do — recruiting the shadow government in waiting, the stars of the last GOP administration, to return to their rightful place of power. In Romney's case, that means calling on the old, failed foreign policy hands of the George W. Bush administration.
Yes, Romney's putting the band back together, tapping a foreign policy team known for its failures in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as its inability to track down the al Qaida leaders responsible for 9/11. That was just another job they left for President Obama, and one that he in fact completed. On Friday, in a major foreign policy speech scheduled for the 10th anniversary of the start of the Afghanistan war, Romney likewise sounded Bush-Cheney themes. It was long on saber-rattling, short on details – and wrong about the few details he deigned to share.
Romney promised to reverse President Obama's "massive defense cuts," except the president didn't make cuts, massive or otherwise. The defense budget jumped from $661 billion in 2009 to $768 billion in 2011. Defense is the area, in fact, where Obama followed the Bush team lead most closely.
The GOP frontrunner pledged a "full review" of our options in Afghanistan, which seems a strangely passive response to a much-analyzed 10 year old war. By contrast, he was happy to war-monger about Iran, calling the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon "unacceptable" and "nothing less than an existential threat to Israel. Iran's suicidal fanatics," he added, "could blackmail the world."
Romney promised his team will make this "another American century." And to make sure, he tapped folks associated with the neoconservative "Project for a New American Century," which began pushing war with Iraq on Bush even before 9/11. Romney advisors now include PNAC founder Robert Kagan and war cheerleader Eliot Cohen, along with two veterans of the incompetent Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority, Dan Senor and Meghan O'Sullivan. The CPA, you'll recall, vetted its staff based on their opinions about abortion and their ties to influential Republican donors and politicians. It's no wonder the CPA botched the post-war "rebuilding" of Iraq, insuring the nation would remain bogged down there another eight years and counting.
Romney's team also includes some folks who advocate war to stop Iran from joining the nuclear club. Iraq hawk Eliot Cohen called for the overthrow of the Iranian regime in 2009, and said only an American or Israeli military strike could stop Iran's nuclear program. Dick Cheney aide Eric Edelman insists "the military option should not be dismissed" as a means to contain Iran's nuclear capabilities. And former CIA director Michael Hayden told CNN last year that attacking Iran "may not be the worst of all possible outcomes."
On economic policy, meanwhile, Romney would probably bring us Reagan 3.0, a return to the supply side theories of tax-cutting to create jobs that gave us the great Bush recession. The bottom line: If you liked Bush's economic and foreign policies, you'll like Romney's. Since the president left office in 2009 with his approval rating in the 20s, it seems a little counterintuitive for Romney to borrow so much of the old program, but the GOP only seems capable of looking backward, not forward right now. All Romney needs is Liz Cheney as his running mate to make the restoration complete.