UVA Hires Dick Cheney / Pentagon Staffer Whose Failures Include Iraq and Mitt Romney

Eric Edelman is a former undersecretary at the Pentagon. He promotes higher military spending, an attack on Iran, and deployment of nuclear weapons to nations on Russia’s border.

He pushed for war on Iraq and accused anyone opposed of “aiding enemies,” including denouncing any sort of end date as “aiding enemies” not long before Bush and Maliki set an end date.

He pushed Obama for esclation in Afghanistan.

He’s on the board of the pro-war “U.S. Institute of Peace.”

He advised Mitt Romney how to become president, and Congress how to tear up the nuclear agreement with Iran. He pushed all sorts of lies about Iran in the process.

Despite his advocacy for more wars all the time, Edelman seems to explain his string of disastrous decisions by explaining that people do dumb things during “war time.” (video)

Here’s a good summary of his work. some excerpts:

Eric S. Edelman, a former U.S. diplomat and adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, has supported a number of militarist policy initiatives. He is a founding board member of the Foreign Policy Initiative, an advocacy group founded in 2009 by neoconservative figures William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor widely regarded as a successor group to the Project for the New American Century. He also served as a key foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 and helped launch a new pressure group dedicated to pressing a hawkish GOP line in the 2016 presidential campaign.

In 2014, Edelman joined the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) as a co-chair of its Iran Task Force, which has pushed a hard line on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. …

Edelman has been a vociferous critic of Obama administration’s foreign policy, claiming that President Obama has an “ideological aversion to American power” …

In a Boston Globe op-ed coauthored with fellow Romney advisers Meghan O’Sullivan and Eliot Cohen shortly before the election, Edelman argued: “Because of the last four years, we face a world in which our enemies do not fear us …

In early 2013, Edelman and other Romney campaign alums joined to form the “John Hay Initiative.”[7] The aim of the group is to influence potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates. Its more than 150 members include prominent militarists such as Eliot Cohen, Michael Chertoff, and former Sen. Norm Coleman. Mitt Romney himself is on the group’s advisory council.[8]

In August 2015, Bloomberg View reported that members of the John Hay Initiative were playing a key role shaping the foreign policy agendas of most of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates. …

The article added: “For the party itself, the group’s omnipresence behind the scenes is shaping a hawkish, right-of-Hillary-Clinton foreign policy agenda that is quickly becoming the established position of the party hopefuls going into 2016.”[10]

In September 2014, Edelman argued in a Washington Post op-ed written with Michele Flournoy, a former Obama administration undersecretary of defense for policy and noted “liberal hawk,” that military spending should be increased … that “the U.S. military must be able to deter or stop aggression in multiple theaters, not just one, even when engaged in a large-scale war.”[11] …

In a Weekly Standardcommentary, Edelman called for the United States “to dispatch a military needs assessment team to identify crucial shortfalls in the Ukrainian military and to lay the basis for urgent and longer-term military assistance programs on a bilateral U.S.-Ukraine basis.”[16]

Edelman has also pushed for greater involvement of NATO in Ukraine, …

Edelman has also taken a hawkish line on Iran. In January 2011, Edelman co-wrote, with two CSBA colleagues, an article for Foreign Affairs titled “The Dangers of a Nuclear Iran: The Limits of Containment.” The article argued that the United States should pursue an approach “that brings diplomacy and sanctions, clandestine action, and the threat of military force into alignment.” …

Edelman also supported U.S. intervention in Syria’s civil war over the Syrian regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons in 2013. Edelman linked the issue to the U.S. standoff with Iran, arguing if the United States does not “enforce the WMD norm in Syria,” Iran would “not put too much stock in the threat of the use of force if they don’t negotiate an end to their nuclear weapons program.”[31] …

The Turkish columnist Ibrahim Karagul described Edelman as “probably the least-liked and trusted American ambassador in Turkish history.” …

Edelman served under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney during the administration of George H.W. Bush. At that time, he became part of a “shop” within the Pentagon that was set up by Cheney “to think about American foreign policy after the Cold War, at the grand strategic level,” wrote Nicholas Lehman in the New Yorker.[40]

The work of this shop, which was headed by Paul Wolfowitz, eventually led to the crafting of the 1992 Draft Defense Planning Guidance, a document that was meant to serve as a post-Cold War framework for U.S. military strategy. 

Here’s the news from the 19th most militarized university in the 1st most militarized nation:
 

Ambassador Eric S. Edelman Appointed James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center

A, Dec. 9, 2015 – Eric S. Edelman, a veteran diplomat and policy adviser during both the Clinton and Bush 43 administrations, has been appointed as the next James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the Miller Center for public policy at the University of Virginia.

 

Ambassador Edelman, currently Hertog Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, retired as a Career Minister from the U.S. Foreign Service on May 1, 2009.  He is also Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and was a senior associate of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University from 2009-2013. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace.  

 

Edelman has served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House, where he led organizations providing analysis, strategy, policy development, security services, trade advocacy, public outreach, citizen services, and congressional relations. As the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (August, 2005-January 2009), he oversaw strategy development as DoD’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls.  

 

“It’s a special honor and pleasure for me to welcome Ambassador Edelman to the Miller Center,” said William Antholis, Director and CEO. “He is widely respected in both parties as one of the leading career diplomats of his generation, and I had the great fortune to work with Eric and learn from him. I’m delighted that my colleagues and UVA students will also have that opportunity. Secretary Schlesinger would have been proud.”  

 

Edelman served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Clinton and Bush Administrations and was Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs. In other assignments he has been Chief of Staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, special assistant to Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Robert Kimmitt and special assistant to Secretary of State George Shultz.  

 

He has been awarded the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, and several Department of State Superior Honor Awards. In January, 2011 he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French Government.

 

Edelman holds a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and earned his Ph.D. in U.S. diplomatic history at Yale University.

 

As the Schlesinger Professor over the next 12 months, Edelman will participate in Miller Center conferences; engage with faculty and students across the University of Virginia at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, the Law School, and the History and Politics Departments; contribute to the First Year project and other Miller Center publications; and appear on the Center’s signature public affairs television interview program, American Forum.

 

The University of Virginia established the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professorship at the Miller Center in 2007 to bring public servants of great distinction to the University. Mr. Schlesinger served as Secretary of Defense and Secretary of Energy, in addition to holding leadership roles with the Central Intelligence Agency, Atomic Energy Agency, and numerous other government bodies during a distinguished career in public service.

 

Building on Schlesinger’s interest in strategic matters, the Schlesinger Professorship provides a unique opportunity for public servants who have experience with foreign policy and national security to participate as visiting faculty in programs at the Miller Center and engage with students at the University, as well as possibly draft memoirs or reflections with the Miller Center’s research support.