Journalist Jim Lobe at his valuable website Lobelog offers more on hawkish new nominee for secretary of defense Ashton Carter. In addition to American air strikes on North Korea, he evidently praised the value of similar counterproliferation strikes on Iran back when. Its just further proof that we should brace ourselves for two years of a significant war presidency Heres Lobes analysis! Neoconservative and other Iran hawks have to be at least somewhat encouraged by Obama’s imminent nomination of Ashton Carter as Chuck Hagel’s replacement at the Pentagon. Before his service—first as Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, and then as Deputy Secretary of Defense—during Obama’s first term, Carter was a strong advocate of using or threatening to use military force to prevent nuclear non-proliferation. Like Dennis Ross, he had served on the Iran task force of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which produced a report in September 2008 that I described at the time as a roadmap to war. It was reportedly drafted by one of the architects of the Iraq invasion and occupation, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, and overseen by Michael Makovsky, then director of foreign policy at the BPC, and currently CEO of the ultra-hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Whether Carter’s views on the subject have changed in the intervening six years—circumstances certainly have changed dramatically—is unknown at this point, although it’s likely that Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee will be eager to find out. Also unknown is how effective he will be in pressing his own views on Iran on the White House, which no doubt intends to maintain its tight control on its policy. But there’s little doubt that he’s a proliferation hawk, and, given the political reality that, as Obama’s fourth Pentagon chief, the president is unlikely to fire him, he may feel freer to give voice to any disagreements he may have with his boss, either directly or via selective leaks. He knows how bureaucratic politics works. lobelog/on-iran-ashton-carter-has-been-hawkish/
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 14:00:00 +0000
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