The New Pentagon Chief, Ashton Carter, and the Beauty of DC Bipartisanship

[jakeXT]

At a White House ceremony, President Obama today introduced his nominee to head the Pentagon, Ashton Carter. The first paragraph of the New York Times article on this event describes Carter as someone “who may advocate a stronger use of American power.” For a country at war for 13 straight years with no end in sight, and which more or less continuously bombs multiple countries simultaneously, what would a “stronger use of American power” look like?

Carter’s recent past provides some clues, as he wrote a Washington Post op-ed in 2006 with former Defense Secretary William Perry that advocated the bombing of North Korea:

If North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead. . . . This is a hard measure for President Bush to take. It undoubtedly carries risk. But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater.

Carter also “believed the U.S. should have left a robust residual troop force in Iraq and believes the military has been asked to swallow dangerously large budget cuts.” Similarly, he was furious when Obama “decided at the last moment to call off military strikes against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.” Moreover, “he was one of the legal architects of the administration’s policy on targeted killings using drone strikes.” And for good measure, he said this in May at a panel discussion at Harvard: “We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Edward Snowden.”

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/05/new-defense-secretary-beauty-dc-bipartisanship/