Tomsyl asks: Why do you believe Obama would clean house at State? No other president ever has. It continues to act like an independent duchy, free to spit in the eye of whoever's in the Oval Office rather than perturb the careers of the people there.

Mark Brzezinski, son of Zbigniew Brzezinski, for one, will get rid of a great many of the worst of them. ZB is now an old man, but he's still advising Obama, and his son is a good man, perfectly capable of wielding his father's cudgels.

ZB is one of my heroes. He, like me, predicted the breakup of the USSR, and for the same reasons. He was tough where he needed to be, farsighted and shrewd, and the State Department did not like him for his stern dealings with the Communists. ZB decried a good deal of the pantywaist pacifism which led the Democratic Party into ignominious decline. ZB also backed Bush 41 "the wiser".

To be sure, many condemn ZB as anti-Israel. This is the usual knee-jerk AIPAC crap from the usual suspects. Nobody here is more pro-Israel than I am, yet I will say this, Israel has greatly erred over the years. Friends tell friends the truth: it’s time for the USA to stop shielding Israel from every criticism. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, but the penalty of such a democracy is the tyranny of the minority. Certain hard-headed people have caused no end of trouble in Israel and in the USA as well, fear-mongering zealots with a Masada Complex, and they are well-represented in the State Department. We cannot be the doting mother who defends her son the bully from every accusation. Most Israelis long for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians: the views ZB condemns are a distinct minority within both Israeli and American societies. To condemn Israel in toto is unwise. The USA has a role to play in negotiating an end to the madness between the Israelis and their neighbors, and we must be true to our own ideals of liberty and justice for all.

You see, once the Democrats were tough guys. ZB wasn't a perfect man, some have blamed him for the creation of the Taliban, but I see other factors there. The USSR tore up the pea patch in Afghan society and it's never really been the same since. The USSR's brutal campaigns against the tribal entities made them all into what we see today: we forget how hard the Pashtuns and Tajik fought, how they died, and they died in great numbers, a rabble pitted against a technologically superior enemy. ZB was right to help them then. The USA abandoned the Afghan people when they most needed us, and the pitiless warlords stepped into that vacuum. Pakistan connived with those warlords and in many ways the war we fight in Afghanistan today is merely Round 2 in a battle we should have fought to a conclusion in the early 1980s.

This began as a statement saying Obama would reform the State Department. Obama is often accused of being a Blank Slate, and this may be true. I could be projecting my own wishes and hopes onto Obama: I cannot say I am not, yet not all hope is vain. I see something within Obama others may not, an opinion shaped by his old advisor Zbig Brzezinski and his son Mark. I see shades of Scoop Jackson, a name perhaps too far back in history for some of you to remember: a Democrat with the will to fight. Scoop Jackson was a vastly imperfect man, I do not see all of Henry Jackson in Obama, but there’s a scent of him in the air. Obama will not be one of your Daddy’s Democrats, the usual pusillanimous McGovern-ite weaklings who tainted the party with their craven kowtowing to assorted Communists. Obama, for all his newness, represents something very old in American politics, a wily know-nothing intellectual who has surrounded himself with men who will not kowtow to the threats we face today from the Islamists.

Obama is a political animal, a geopolitical animal. He plays a dangerous game in Europe, seemingly trespassing on the mandate of the president to conduct statecraft. It is an act of astonishing hubris. Bush is a lame duck, but the foxes usually wait for the duck to die before moving in. Obama has already starting pulling feathers off the bird. The Bush Administration can splutter in rage, but there’s nothing they can do. They used up all the goodwill generated by 9/11, sneering at Old Europe.

Europe may be old, but every year the Hochschulen graduate new classes of engineers and scientists. We have lost technical supremacy in physics to CERN, and a new tier of fiber optics will pump 15 petabytes of data from the world’s best collider all over Europe. We have lost intellectual supremacy, we have lost market supremacy and we have lost moral supremacy. Reforming our country to face the new challenges of China and Russia, societies lacking the niceties of freedom we enjoy in the USA will require a thorough housecleaning, beginning in the Department of State, our face to the world.

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