Can You Know Them By Their Advisers?

Yesterday I listened with interest to a Democracy Now piece on the links between foreign policy advisers of presidential candidates in both parties to human rights atrocities in the past. Amy Goodman interviewed Allain Nairn, a blogger and Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a freelance journalist who wrote "War Whisperers" for American Conservative to discuss, quoting Vlahos, the "establishment clique" of "so-called liberal interventionists on the Democratic side or your war hawks on the Republican side." What caught my ear was the yardstick used by Nairn to measure the men and women advising the candidates:

Well, I think one thing you could say about the advisers for all the candidates who have a chance is that the presence of these advisers makes it clear that these candidates aren’t serious about enforcing the murder laws and that they’re willing to kill civilians, foreign civilians, en masse in order to advance US policy. And they’re not serious about law and order. They’re soft on crime.

Nairn goes into some detail about the atrocities associated with Clinton advisors such as Madelein Albright, Richard Holbrooke, and General Wesley Clarke; Obama advisors General Merrill McPeak, Anthony Lake, Dennis Ross and Zbigniew Brzezinski; and speculations about Edwards:

The list of his foreign advisers is not as complete, so it’s not as clear exactly where they may be coming from, but it’s interesting. Last night on TV, one of the top Edwards advisers, “Mudcat” Saunders, was complaining about the fact that there are 35,000 lobbyists in Washington. And it appears, from the Edwards list, that many of the military lobbyists are working on the Edwards foreign policy team, because the names that—the Edwards names that are out there mainly come from the Army and the Air Force and the Navy Material Command. Those are the portions of the Pentagon that do the Defense contracts, that do the deals with the big companies like Raytheon and Boeing, etc. One of those listed on the Edwards team is the lobbyist for the big military contractor EADS. So, although Edwards talks about going after lobbyists, if he tries to go after the military lobbyists, he may get a little blowback from his own advisers.

As discussed by Nairn, the atrocity links of advisers to Democrats arise more from the devastating effects of sanctions, political calculation and globalization than from outright violence, though there is plenty of that, too. It reminds me of the old Woody Guthrie line about "some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen."

The advisers to Republican candidates are simply outright violent: Henry Kissinger (whose behind the bombings of Cambodia and Laos, and the coup that installed Pinochet), Al Haig (who backed the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala), Norman Podhoretz (who advocates bombing Iran with no restraint), Bud McFarlane (the Contras in Nicaragua), and Max Boot:

McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be doing today.

Makes ya wanna vomit. Anyhoo, my question is this: Can we anticipate the real world effects of the foreign policies favored by the candidates based on the source of their advice? I don't think the answer can be affirmed or denied absolutely. Granted, I completely dismiss the Republican candidates, whose rhetoric is filled blood lust and chest beating; so the presence of so many architects of violence and oppression in their camp doesn't surprise me (nor, sadly, the fact that so many of them roam free in civil society.) I am more interested in what is to be made of the advisers to the Democrats. Nairn offers this bit of "fuzzy math" (to quote another human rights violator):

Well, fundamentally, there’s no difference on the basic principle of, are you against the killing of civilians and are you willing to enforce the murder laws. If we were willing to enforce the murder laws, the headquarters of each of these candidates could be raided, and various advisers and many candidates could be hauled away by the cops, because they have backed various actions that, under established principles like the Nuremberg Principles, like the principles set up in the Rwanda tribunals, the Bosnia tribunals, things that are unacceptable, like aggressive war, like the killing of civilians for political purposes. So, in a basic sense, there is no choice.

But there is a difference in this sense: the US is so vastly powerful, the US influences and has the potential to end so many millions of lives around the world, that if, let’s say, you have two candidates that are 99% the same—there’s only 1% difference between them—if you’re talking about decisions that affect a million lives—1% of a million is 10,000—that’s 10,000 lives. So, even though it’s a bitter choice, if you choose the one who is going to kill 10,000 fewer people, well, then you’ve saved 10,000 lives. We shouldn’t be limited to that choice. It’s unacceptable. And Americans should start to realize that it’s unacceptable.

Everybody say, "Wha?" Put your hands in the air like you went mad with despair. But seriously, I sympathize with Nairn's principle regarding the killing of civilians, and his "bitter choice" plays to the cynic within me. But does that truly encapsulate an Obama or an Edwards? What if they are better than that? What if they offer foreign policy alternatives that transcend the backgrounds of their advisers and help reconstruct the damage done by both war and globalization? Nairn is right about the size of American economic and military influence in the world, that it can be disproportionately harmful to the billions of poor people in the world by either direct violence or through economic policies that perpetuate their poverty through exploitation, neglect and corruption. Indeed, even a well-intentioned misstep could have painful, deadly consequences.

Yet we live in a world run by elites. And I mean "world"— America is not the only powerful player with imperialist ambitions. A candidate like Obama or Edwards (more so Edwards) offers the promise of whittling away at the disproportionate power systemically granted to these political and economic elites shaping our lives. But I don't think it ends there, nor should it. It really depends on how willing people are to disempower corporatist and imperialist ideologues in both parties. We may be seeing signs of such in the successes of Obama, Edwards, Huckabee and Paul last night. Or maybe that's just a mirage.