Hillary Consulted Republicans, Neocons, And Liberals For Big Foreign Policy Speech

[IndianaGreen]

So Hillary consulted with the war criminal Henry Kissinger, the architect of the Pinochet coup in Chile. We now got a similar coup in Honduras. Hmmm....

Hillary Consulted Republicans, Neocons, And Liberals For Big Foreign Policy Speech

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has consulted with a surprisingly diverse ideological bunch in the course of creating the major foreign policy speech she plans to deliver tomorrow, including Republicans like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and George Schultz, and onetime neocons like Francis Fukuyama, a source familiar with the speech-writing process tells me.

Hillary is set to deliver her high-profile speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, and is set to articulate her own policy agenda, one focused on strengthening America’s “smart power,” according to The Politico. It could help settle whether she has privately favored a more hawkish stance towards hostile foreign powers, as she reportedly has.

The array of people she has consulted for this speech is striking in its diversity, boasting a notable array of Republicans, foreign policy “realists” and hawkish voices. A partial list:

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state; George Schultz, Reagan’s secretary of state; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s hawkish “realist” foreign policy adviser; Paul Farmer, a doctor and international humanitarian; Joseph Nye, a major proponent of “soft power,” the idea that persuasion and attraction can be more effective than coercion; Francis Fukuyama, who helped drive the rise of neoconservatism; Brent Scowcroft; the “realist” national security adviser under George H.W. Bush; Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s deputy secretary of state; John Podesta, the head of the liberal Center for American Progress; and Richard Lugar, the Republican Senator who has praised Obama’s response to the Iran crisis.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/foreign-policy/hillary-consulted-republicans-neocons-and-liberals-for-big-foreign-policy-speech/

[applegrove]

1. You know when 9/11 happened I assumed all the brilliant minds in the USA

would get together and decide America's response to the attack and that President Bush would call on them after such an attack. I was sure of it. As I was consoling my Canadian ass with this dream Cheney and Rummy were busy making plans for the invasion of Iraq. And not consulting anyone outside their tight circle.

I'm glad Hillary is asking for advice from all sorts of people. Finally. 8 years later the Obama administration is getting all the best minds together to figure out foreign policy in this dangerous of times.

[IndianaGreen]

2. Many, many years ago I read David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest

The one thing that stuck in mind from The Best and the Brightest was how some of the brightest people from the most elite schools got Vietnam so wrong. Their hubris led them into making the wrong assumptions about Vietnam and into thinking the war was winnable. They created their own echo chamber and became so rigid in their thinking that even after it became clear the war could not be won, they couldn't bring themselves to reverse course.

[applegrove]

4. But surely you see a change is policy with Obama, pulling out of Iraq and concentrating on bin Laden

[IndianaGreen]

6. I see Obama sinking in the Afghanistan quagmire

And the Taleban are not bin Laden.

[BlueMTexpat]

3. I am very happy to see her speaking with all sorts of people, not simply

those that I would agree with, especially if she can learn from their mistakes ... not that some of them would admit that they had ever been mistaken.

I have always been a Lugar fan, although never a fan of Kissinger or Fukuyama. I hope that she takes a lot of what those two have to say with a real grain of salt.

But I also hope that she consults at least some of the State Department professionals with foreign experience who resigned during *'s tenure because they could not support his illegal policies.

[applegrove]

5. I hope you are right.