TAP on Obama’s Foreign Policy Team

A belated acknowledgement of this important article by recovering Peretz disciple Spencer Ackerman.  Though curiously avoiding Obama’s truly impressive realist advisers like Brezinski, Korb, and McPeak, it gives a generally sypathetic to the core of ex-Carter officials like Anthony Lake and Susan Rice, in addition to irritating bromides about Samantha Power.

Larison, surprise surprise, is on a tear, and in this case he’s on solid ground.  Samantha Power is clearly exposed here to be a complete flake who’s getting in way over her head, and Ackerman still has enough TNR in him to be sympathetic.  I naturally was always incredibly wary of her with her “genocide” expertise, though was heartened when everyone tore into her for not mincing her words about the Israel Lobby.   The Kirchicks of the world even implicated her in what they rightly or wrongly view as Obama’s realism, almost certainly I must conclude unknowingly on her part.

Anyone who was shocked or upset by Power’s more infamous (and, of course, truthful) comments about Hillary Clinton must still belong to something that calls itself a ladies’ auxiliary.  But Obama is probably still better off without someone who uses a word like “baddies” to describe a group like Hamas.