February 22, 2008
Danzig, dude! Oh, *Richard* Danzig?
The NY Sun's Eli Lake ties together some of the loose ends on Obama's foreign-policy and national-security advisory team. Not surprisingly, the piece is mostly tea-leaf reading on an Obama administration's stance on Israel. The most refreshing point is that
Mr. Obama has not pledged to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem as soon as he takes office, a promise made by every major candidate for president since Ronald Reagan in 1980, and a promise broken by every president since the Reagan administration.It's about time--Tel Aviv is a much nicer place to live than it used to be, especially if you're a trance DJ, and Jerusalem much less so.
The advisory team itself was already reasonably well known, with Samantha Power and Tony Lake getting the most attention. Perhaps the least familiar is chief military-affairs advisor, Richard Danzig, SecNav under Clinton. Danzig is an almost comically overachieving egghead, who wrote his doctoral thesis, at Oxford, on Gandhi, and was thought to have been on Al Gore's short list for SecDef. Depending on whom you ask, he was either the most inspirational SecNav in history, or a sworn enemy of all that is right and true in the USN, which he thought
should operate like a jazz band, with a leader setting a theme and the band members improvising on their various instruments.
I wonder what Captain (Ret.) John S. McCain III will make of that.
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