Antiwar groups fear Barack Obama may create hawkish Cabinet

I did not mean to spend all my time reading the LATimes online version, but I found two more stories I just had to post.  Here is the second.   My heart skipped a beat when I read the headline and then I did little happy hops around my computer.  He isn’t even officially our President-elect (think electoral college) and there are already suspicions from those that “propelled Obama to the White House” that he may not have meant what he said.   I can’t decide whether to roll my eyes or laugh out loud.

Don’t get me wrong: I was not happy about Iraq, I do not support war without reason (including revenge or oil), but I found it difficult to believe Obama about anything, not even the war.

Guess I’m going to have to do both 🙄 or   😆

On the other hand, for lost friends, lost family, lost country this one is for you.   😥

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Activists note that most of the candidates for top security posts voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq or otherwise supported launching the war.

By Paul Richter
November 20, 2008

Reporting from Washington — Antiwar groups and other liberal activists are increasingly concerned at signs that Barack Obama’s national security team will be dominated by appointees who favored the Iraq invasion and hold hawkish views on other important foreign policy issues.The activists are uneasy not only about signs that both Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates could be in the Obama Cabinet, but at reports suggesting that several other short-list candidates for top security posts backed the decision to go to war.

“Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning,” said Kelly Dougherty, executive director of the 54-chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War.

The activists — key members of the coalition that propelled Obama to the White House — fear he is drifting from the antiwar moorings of his once-longshot presidential candidacy. Obama has eased the rigid timetable he had set for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and he appears to be leaning toward the center in his candidates to fill key national security posts.

The president-elect has told some Democrats that he expects to take heat from parts of his political base but will not be deterred by it.

Aside from Clinton and Gates, the roster of possible Cabinet secretaries has included Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who both voted in 2002 for the resolution authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq, though Lugar has since said he regretted it.”It’s astonishing that not one of the 23 senators or 133 House members who voted against the war is in the mix,” said Sam Husseini of the liberal group Institute for Public Accuracy.

Clinton, who was Obama’s chief opponent during the Democratic presidential primaries, appears to be the top candidate for secretary of State in his administration. Speculation about Clinton has dismayed some liberal activists but has cheered some conservatives such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and editor William Kristol of the Weekly Standard.

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Kevin Martin, executive director of the group Peace Action, said that although Obama had campaigned as an agent of change, the president-elect is “a fairly centrist guy” who appears to be choosing from the Democratic foreign policy establishment — “and nobody from outside it.”

“So, in the short term, we’re going to be disappointed,” he said. “They may turn out to be all pro-war, or at least people who were pro-war in the beginning.”

Martin said that his group was concerned about Gates and Clinton as well as Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s choice for White House chief of staff. He also said his group was trying to mobilize its grass-roots supporters with e-mail alerts, but recognized that it must approach the subject delicately because of public euphoria over Obama’s historic victory.

“There’s so much Obama hero worship, we’re having to walk this line where we can’t directly criticize him,” he said. “But we are expressing concern.”

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HERO WORSHIP !!!!!   😯    What has he ever done that was heroic in the slightest?

Maybe he mean idol worship.  Who knows.

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“I take him at his word that he is committed to ending the occupation of Iraq in 16 months and that he’s going to assemble a team that’s committed to that goal,” Andrews said.

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Richter is a writer in our Washington bureau.

paul.richter@latimes.com

Times staff writer Peter Nicholas in Washington contributed to this article.

read the story here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks20-2008nov20,0,4071453.column