Both boxes ticked on that front.

And I think many of the things you’re laying at the door of the Defence Department can be traced back to other policy makers.

It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.

Not sure if I’m so keen on the issue of balance, though. I’d have preferred to see ruthless purges throughout all levels of the administration.

Ben

Also, one of the reasons I linked to that TPM piece was that it brought you to this NYTimes article, which gives an interesting flavour of the changes which might occur:

“Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

However this works in practice is difficult to say, of course, but it’s certainly possible to see a rebalancing of ‘hard’ and ’soft’ power, even within the very ‘hard’ realm of national security.

Well, it means that, while foreign policy will be business as usual, he’ll be a tricky target for satire. Everybody’s a loser.

Ben