Who's in McCain's Ear? McCain's Neo-Conservative Circle of Advisers

Not that GOP presidential candidate Senator John McCain’s actually shown up in Nevada to do much more that pick up the checks, but he would have us believe that he has the foreign policy expertise to ‘start on day one.’ We might want to press Day One back a decade or so, if this is what passes for foreign affairs expertise from the Arizona Senator:

“Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back." Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate." A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then said: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda." [WaPo]

If the Senator requires the services of a continually self-correctly ear-piece over an issue as relatively simple as Iranian influence vis a vis Iraqi insurgencies, then imagine how many people it would take to surround him with enough information to analyze issues in regard to U.S. importation and banking agreements with Asia and European central banks?

There’s also a second question that begs asking: Who is speaking into the Senator’s ear and what are these people saying?

In addition to Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft, and William Kristol, often mentioned as “McCain advisers,” an early (2006) list included: Randy Scheunemann, a director of the Project for A New American Century; Gary Schmitt, a senior fellow with PNAC; Stephen Biegun, former national security adviser to Senator Bill Frist; Barry McCaffrey; Niall Ferguson; Robert Zoelick, former Deputy Secretary of State and former U.S. Trade Representative; Richard Armitage; Eliot Cohen, Charles Larson, on the Board of Directors of Northrop Grumman; Bernard Aronson, former asst. Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Lorne Craner, President of the International Republican Institute,and Robert Kimmitt.

Two advisers may have jumped off the page for you: Scheunemann and Schmitt – both directly connected with the now-infamous Project for a New American Century. Scheunemann is now serving as McCain’s Director of Foreign Policy and National Security. [McClatchy] As of February 2008, Scheunemann was telling reporters that McCain would use military force only as a last resort. For all intents and purposes, we’ve been down this primrose path before. What reporters may have missed is that Scheunemann was the co-founder and executive director of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and has taken credit for McCain’s “Rogue State Rollback” concepts. The CLI included GOP and neo-conservative stalwarts like the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and James Woolsey. [RWeb] If these names sound familiar, they should, each contributed to the current Bush Administration’s policy on Iraq.

Gary Schmitt is a fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, and ascribes to the Straussian view “deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.” [TP] [NYker] Schmitt, who was a full-throated cheerleader for the assault on and occupation of Iraq, has adopted the “failed execution” line when discussing the current morass: “In an interview with the BBC, Schmitt argued that in any case it wasn't the ideas of neoconservatives that drove the Bush administration: "Our ideas have not necessarily dominated. We did not have anyone sitting on Bush's shoulder. So the work now is to see how they are implemented. Obviously it makes life difficult with the specific failure in Iraq, but I do not agree with Richard Perle that we should never have gone in. I do argue that the execution should have been better. In fact, I argued in late 2003 that we needed more troops and a proper counterinsurgency policy" (BBC, December 21, 2006).” [RtWeb] The old aphorism is true: Success has a million parents; failure is an orphan.

Robert Kagan has signed on as an “informal foreign policy adviser.” Kagan once served under Elliott Abrams as head of the Office of Public Diplomacy – which was tasked with creating support for the Nicaraguan Contras. Kagan is also an advocate of “a benevolent American global hegemony based on military dominance.” [TP] In his book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (2003), he argues that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less." Kagan claims that because Europe has benefited from 60 years of U.S. security guarantees, it has not been forced to spend as much on defense as the United States and is softer when it comes to issues like Iraq and other "rogue states." [RtWeb] This sort of advice isn’t likely to improve American relations with some of our closest and most important allies. However, it is just the sort of advice that McCain is the most likely to take seriously.

The inclusion of Eliot Cohen to the 2006 list of advisers, formal and informal highlights Senator McCain’s proclivity for neo-conservative thinking. Now serving as an adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Cohen is perhaps best known for his book Supreme Command, popular in neo-con circles, which argues essentially argues that war is too important to be left to generals.

Senator McCain may have flip-flopped to the right during the run-up to the 2008 general election on several issues, but his position on the use of military force has been a constant. The Jewish World Review reported in 1999: “McCain embraces American might, believing that it gives us the opportunity to better promote our interests, roll back rogue nations, preserve international order, and advance the cause of democratic self-government around the world. As he demonstrated during the Kosovo crisis, McCain, more than any of the other Republican presidential candidates, believes in using American military might to advance America’s democratic ideals and punish outrageous dictators who threaten peace.” Candidate McCain, 2008 edition, hasn’t moved far, if at all, from this position:

“In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.” [The Nation] Unfortunately, it’s the likes of Perle, and his neo-conservative associates in PNAC and other institutions to whom McCain is listening.

If Senator McCain is intent on applying military solutions to diplomatic and political problems, then his association with Lorne Craner, of the International Republican Institute, adds another layer to the candidate’s connections with neo-conservative activism. This connection demonstrates rather clearly the inter-connectedness of right wing militarists and hardliners inside the Beltway: “Most of its (IRI) staff and board have links to right-wing think tanks, foundations, and policy institutes, while many also represent major financial, oil, and defense corporations. George A. Folsom, IRI former president and CEO, was a member of the Bush-Cheney Transition Team, serving on the Treasury Department task force. An international investment banker, Folsom was a leading member of the Scowcroft Group, an international advisory firm headed by Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush's national security adviser and current IRI board member.” [RtWeb]

The IRC is closely associated with the National Endowment for Democracy, which has been infamous of late for its interventionist philosophy toward Central and South American nations.
NED supported the creation of a series of neoconservative-led front groups that sought bipartisan and U.S. public support for an interventionist policy in Central America, which was part of the larger rollback, containment policy advocated by groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger and the Coalition for Peace through Strength. One of the most prominent of these NED-financed front groups was the Project for Democracy in Central America (PRODEMCA), whose objectives merged the hard (military) and soft (political aid/public diplomacy) sides of the neoconservative agenda in Central America. [RtWeb]

So, Americans who want endless military involvement in Middle Eastern wars, an organization superseding the CIA with ultra-covert powers, the establishment of an American dominated quasi-international organization to bypass the United Nations, [TN] and intervention to support right wing governments in South America – will find that McCain’s their candidate. At the very least – that’s the advice that’s likely to go into his ears.