Ownership of foreign policy
I have my reservations about the way Ross Douthat carves up the world in this post. For him 'progressive' and 'liberal hawk' evidently belong in different conceptual domains. But I won't argue the toss on that right now. I'm interested in his take on some of the projected Obama appointments:
As Iraq has grown more stable and the rest of the world more chaotic, it's become easy to lose sight of just how difficult disentangling ourselves from our Mesopotamian occupation may turn out to be. Both his own promises and the agreements we've made with the Iraqi government bind Obama to make the attempt: We will not, I'm certain, withdraw with the kind of haste that he promised in his primary campaign, but we will withdraw nonetheless. But there will be difficulties - maybe a lot of difficulties - along the way, and it's very easy to imagine a scenario in which the withdrawal from Iraq ends up dominating the foreign-affairs side of the ledger in Obama's first term, and not necessarily in a good way. And by putting the job in the hands of Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton - a Republican appointee and a primary-season rival who attacked him from the right on foreign policy - Obama has effectively given realists and liberal hawks partial ownership of whatever happens in Iraq between now and 2011. In a best-case scenario for progressives, Gates and Clinton will play the role Colin Powell played in the run-up to the Iraq War (except with a better final outcome, obviously): Their association with the policy will help keep non-progressives on board when things get dicey, and then once the job is done they'll be pushed aside and someone like Susan Rice will take over Obama's post-occupation foreign policy.
Apart from the fact that 'realists and liberal hawks' already have partial ownership of the sequel in Iraq, nothing can change the fact that Obama himself will have total ownership of his foreign policy, regardless of whom precisely he appoints to implement it.
Apropos. You knew that Christopher Hitchens would come out with a blast against Hillary Clinton going to the State Department. You were right. (Via Andrew.)
