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President-elect Barack Obama’s top appointments shouldn’t be ignored, but here are crucial sub-cabinet jobs critical to the success of his foreign-policy agenda.

Jul 31, 20208.3K Shares311K Views
Image has not been found. URL: /wp-content/uploads/2008/10/obama-iraq.jpgFlickr: Barack Obama
With much of President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet still unnamed, it’s understandable that speculation should focus on who helms the different agencies. After all, running cabinet departments is a big job, and the personalities Obama has nominated so far — New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, for instance — are politically larger than life. So are those whom Obama is expected to name, like Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.
But all the focus on who will sit in Obama’s cabinet overlooks a basic fact of governance. Much, if not most, of the actual substance of policy — from its detailed conception to its experimentation to its implementation — doesn’t come from the heads of the federal agencies. It comes from deep in their guts.
This is particularly true for national security and foreign policy. When it comes to managing foreign relations and securing the country, the middle-to-upper-middle tiers of the Departments of State, Defense and Justice, along with the National Security Council staff and the intelligence community, are often critical posts. Those positions are policy laboratories and career boosters, offices where policy is refined and offices where policy gets killed by poor implementation or bureaucratic machination. As one Democratic foreign-policy expert recently put it, “These are your foreign-policy change agents.”
Not that it will — or even should — stop speculation on the composition of Obama’s cabinet, but here are five critical sub-cabinet positions that will play an outsize role in shaping Obama’s foreign policy. For the record, the Obama transition team declined to comment about who’ll fill these jobs. But those who do eventually will have a heavy burden to shoulder.
1. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. The Iraqi government is now debating a deal with Washington that would end the foreign military presence by December 2011. But that doesn’t mean Iraq’s problems are on a reliable course to be solved by then.
Most important, there isn’t a stable national or sectarian consensus about the composition of the Iraqi government. Crucial — even existential — questions remain about how much power should be concentrated in Baghdad; whether and how the Shiite-led government could absorb tens of thousands of the mostly-Sunni militiamen known as the Sons of Iraq, and who will govern large areas in northern Iraq claimed by both Arabs and Kurds. If that isn’t enough, the so-called Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the U.S. and Iraqi governments demands that the U.S. military withdraw from cities and large towns by mid-2009 and gives the Iraqi government wide latitude over U.S. military operations.
All of which means that whomever succeeds Amb. Ryan Crocker at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad will have a task unlike any of his or her predecessors. The next ambassador has to “assess the situation accurately to let withdrawal proceed as expeditiously as possible without causing more problems than it solves,” said Daniel Serwer, a former State Dept. official who is now a scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Thanks to the SOFA, the U.S.’s strategic mission in Iraq has been recast from victory to extrication. Managing withdrawal in all its dimensions — coordination with the military, with the Iraqi government, with the region and with the White House — has to be job No. 1.
“There are so many different directions this person need be superb in,” Serwer said. “Handling the military, assessing the situation in Iraq and developing good rapport with the Iraqis, see[ing] around the next corner if things are going off the rails. It’s a tremendous challenge.”
That’s especially true if the Obama administration tries to broker a pan-sectarian compact for a post-U.S. Iraq. If that’s the case, the next ambassador might look like an imperial viceroy — even as the U.S. exits the country.
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  • **Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low-Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities.This obscure job is as much a mouthful as it is critical. As the Pentagon’s principal outpost for irregular warfare, the directorate formerly known by the awkward acronym SO/LIC (it’s now “SO/LIC & IC” on the Pentagon org-chart) has emerged as a hotbed of unconventional thinking — much as the Office of Net Assessment was for a previous generation of tech-crazy defense wonks.
Earlier this year, one of its recent acting chiefs, Joseph Collins, published a scathing study of the Iraq war, calling it a “major debacle.”Collins was at SO/LIC & IC for the invasion, making him a rare veteran of the Rumsfeld Pentagon to publicly describe the war so harshly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the new generation of theorist-practitioners who specialize in counterinsurgencyhave gravitated to the office. Prominent counterinsurgents like Janine Davidsonand Celeste Ward recently worked there, and the idea for an interagency network of irregular-warfare specialistsgrew out of their efforts. At a recent counterinsurgency conference, attendees from across the military services wanted to know whether a high-profile counterinsurgent like retired Army officer John Nagl would become its new assistant secretary or deputy assistant secretary in charge, auguring another advance by the counterinsurgents along the corridors of power.
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  • Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel. **It’s fair to say that, until the Bush administration, few people even in Washington knew what the Office of Legal Counsel did. In normal administrations, the Justice Dept. office offers guidance about the legality of questionable or controversial policy proposals, or it helps cabinet departments and the White House clear up legal disputes.
Then President George W. Bush transformed it into a vehicle for giving a legal imprimatur to torture, indefinite detention, kidnapping and warrantless surveillance. Political appointees like John Yoomade baroque arguments claiming the presidency has inherent wartime authority to disobey cumbersome laws. Much of what the OLC did, it did in secret: memos from 2002 authorizing torture were publicly disavowed in late 2004 — only to be essentially reissued in secret by new acting OLC chief Steve Bradbury.
Since Obama has pledged to end torture and indefinite detention, his pick for OLC chief will be intensely scrutinized, as will that chief’s first series of actions. For many progressives, the OLC chief has a simple mission: rollback.
“One of the things that will have to be done very early on,” said Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel with the ACLU, should be “looking at each opinion [from the Bush-era OLC] and deciding whether it will stay in effect or be withdrawn immediately. Our view in the interrogation area is that all opinions [authorizing torture] should be withdrawn, and in its place [should be] a single opinion on what is legally permissible and impermissible in interrogation and detention — and that opinion should be made public.”
Beyond rollback, though, the OLC’s activity will be key if Obama — as expected — recasts the legal foundation for the war on terrorism. Expect an important OLC ruling to form the basis of any new attempt at creating hybrid civilian-military trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
**4. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. **Here’s a rare case where we might actually know who holds this job. If Obama asks Robert Gates to stay on as secretary of defense for a while longer, Eric Edelman might remain at the helm of one of the largest single Pentagon directorates. Edelman, a former ambassador to Turkey, served as an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney during Bush’s first term. Thus, it’s at least possible that a former braintruster of the man Vice President-elect Joseph Biden called“the most dangerous vice-president we’ve had probably in American history” might wind up on the Obama team.
Beyond that awkward situation, the undersecretary of defense for policy plays a large role in shaping national-security policy. Next year, the directorate will produce a massive document called the Quadrennial Defense Review that envisions the overall scope of U.S. military missions. The QDR, as it’s called, has huge implications for how forces train, equip themselves and prepare for the near future — meaning that it guides military spending, which currently stands at a gargantuan half-trillion dollars annually.
Outside of the QDR, the policy directorate is in charge of all Pentagon regional analysis and operational study. It works hand-in-glove with the military’s joint staff to understand and shape policy. Crucial aspects of the war on terrorism emerge from and are shaped by the policy shop — not least of which are detentions and interrogations policy.
In the Bush administration’s first term, Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith used the directorate to create an alternative intelligence-analysis agency and plan the legendarily poorly-planned occupation of Iraq. Whomever inherits the post after Edelman — or, perhaps, Edelman himself — will have a large opportunity to shape defense policy, including filling dozens of subordinate jobs.
**5. Director for the Middle East on the National Security Council. **One of the most critical positions in the national-security bureaucracy is also one of the least visible. Despite possessing practically no budget, the director for the Middle East at the National Security Council is responsible for coordinating the efforts of the numerous cabinet departments with Middle East-relevant portfolios to come up with a coherent policy. “It can’t do an end run around the State Dept.,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and current scholar at the Century Foundation. “You want someone who’s coordinating everyone, to get them talking off the same message box.”
It’s easier said than done. In Bush’s first term, the director, Flynt Leverett — an advocate of energetic U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and diplomatic engagement with Iran, and an opponent of invading Iraq — was almost entirely out of step with the rest of the Bush administration’s Middle East-focused officials. His successor, the neoconservative eminence and convicted Iran-Contra co-conspirator Elliott Abrams, worked vigorously to obstruct U.S. involvement in an Israeli-Palestinian peace process. And the cabinet secretaries’ high profile often meant it was difficult to keep their envoys coordinated.
With Obama likely to appoint similarly prestigious officials — like Clinton at State and Gates back to Defense — the next director will face this challenge all over again, along with an even-more-complex Middle East environment.
“The job just requires an enormous amount of what’s called perspicacity,” said USIP’s Serwer with a laugh. “It’s not only Iraq, but especially Iraq, and the nuclear question with Iran. How urgent is it? Is it immediately pressing? Or do you deal with Iraq first or then Iran? Also there’s the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the smart money now is on the possibility that the next successful step will be peace with Syria.”
All this will be on the plate of the next NSC Middle East director. What he or she decides to make the top priority — setting the table for negotiations with Iran? A regional conference on the future of Iraq? Talks between Israel and Syria? — will tell a significant amount about the course of the Obama administration’s policy for the entire region.
Paula M. Graham

Paula M. Graham

Reviewer
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