than the unilateralist porn we've had for 8 years. But we'll see- it may be worse or no different. I personally assume the chorus of hard-right neocons of the Cheney stripe will still be second-guessing.
What would have been your ideal appointment list?

_{Yes, I can come up with a post-election signature, just... not... yet...}

in his Clusterufuck diary.

I did inhale.

I think Barack is smart enough to avoid Bush errors. I've said why here:

http://stephencrose.wordpress.com

Fortunately with the Clintons still in the mix, we can expect that the same general coverup of covert ops and shady aircraft front companies will continue to serve the elite geopolitical role they've had for decades! This mass of establishment sneeky bastards will never let my favorite corrupt shell game fall apart. (and the companion prisoner aircraft network will likely keep on going too.)

On the other hand, all that laundered money used to provide crucial liquidity and a nice source of low-interest capital for Wall Street; we've got to get it rolling again to loosen things up around here!!

Afghanistan & Colombia, your fun ain't over yet!

--
Hongpong.com

Haven't checked in a while but totally predicted this. I blogged that Hillary was left of Obama, and am now wowed by his ability - and now we get Hillary in the mix.

Realism, consensus building, war as last resort. A fantastic win win win. And besides all those Agonists who so love Nader, Dean and Edwards get to complain about 'conspiracies' for another four years - wink.

It is shaping up to be a "stay the course" right to the bottom looking future.

Why, oh why, do modern Democratic presidents seem so intent on focusing almost exclusively on domestic policy? That's what i'm getting out of this foreign policy lineup, that Obama is going to let other people do the majority of the decision making. I had hoped that he was planning on exiling Clinton to Foggy Bottom, but i fear that he's going to let her make decisions...and i'll be astounded if they're good ones.

On the up side, at least this group has the real potential to finish driving the empire into the ground.

in a "change we can believe in" Obama administration going forward. For here is a military intervention infrastructure supporting a "solution" looking for a "problem"; indeed, many African countries remain sceptical - not to say suspicious - of this Pentagon entity, and several have rejected out-of-hand an "offer" to be a "host nation" for the Command HQ. So much so, than ranking command officers have presented Africom's "mission" and "strategic success" to include - inter alia - "...an African continent that knows liberty, peace, stability, and increasing prosperity,and...democratic governance". In fact, there are those in academic circles, think tanks, military War Colleges, the lot, who now are proferring "the new paradigm" of foreign aid, which is to say, "humanitarian intervention" as a closely-linked effort by (Western) governments of combined corps of soldiers and social scientists directed at "failed states" to remove the causes of terrorism, and to replace with "legitimate and stable security institutions", "good governance", and the whole panoply of meddling and interference that has characterised the developed world's attitude toward post-colonial countries round the globe. And in fact The US Army has published several treatises invoking "the new paradigm" of military intervention: the use of small, mobile, wholly wired, technically advanced, "culturally sensitive" forces as military adjuncts to "failed-state makeovers", where local military commanders will act as pro tem governors until "democratic institutions" are put in place by the civilian component to an occupation.
William Easterly did a masterful job of summarising this "new thinking" in a recent issue of NYRB, where he took issue with the major premises one of the strategists and researchers in the field, and Easterly's review is worth reading:
Foreign Aid Goes Military!
By William Easterly
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
by Paul Collier
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22126

With the US rapidly going broke, and a $800bn Pentagon budget comprising traditional military appropriations to support global warmaking, The New Paradigm fits nicely with an incipient and severe downsizing of the DOD's fixation on massively expensive weapons of war into something more adaptable to "small wars" within the context of "the long war". Now, Barack Obama may in fact impose a new definition of "the long war", binning the GWOT rubric, and introducing a more palatable and sanitised version of the military option, and it remains to be seen whether the Petraeus COIN approach will find its way into an "Obama Doctrine" as well. As the noted journalist and writer on security matters, Thomas Powers, remarked recently, "...in the long run counterinsurgency comes down to the same self-defeating strategy--killing locals until they stop trying to make us go away".
The use of cruise and Predator-based missile attacks in Somalia, along with "rendition" of suspected "terrorists" to Kenyan jails are outstanding examples of a failed policy directed at a very complex, purely local attempt by local actors to force a resolution to a "failed state" problem, and it's obvious to all that if the West is to have any positive influence in the eventual governing entity that arises from the ashes in Somalia, it won't be spearheaded by an Africom, or anything like it.
Yes, there are opportunities aplenty within the African continent to demonstrate a new way of doing business for the Obama administration, especially as it concerns the major oil-producing countries of Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, which currently are governed by corrupt oligarchies or outright kleptocracies, and also, in the case of Nigeria, engaged in serious insurgency actions. "Watchful waiting" is required here for clues about foreign policy "change we can believe in".

The president sets the tone of those that work for him. Bush sent a message early on regarding what he wanted from his cabinet. And he got it.

Supposedly Obama told Gates his mission is to get us out of Iraq within 16 months. The fact that Gates is willing to take the job indicates he may be willing to try.

I remain cynical, yet can't help but hope, just a little.

I will reserve an opinion until I see how Obama governs.

I got the shock of my life when I encountered my dad, a conservative Repulican reading a book by Obama (his first). And then to hear dad say Obama may have more to him than we expected.

We may have elected an extraordinary man to the presidency.

Time will tell. And soon.

I did inhale.