An apologist for Syria denies he's Obama's adviser
Yesterday Paul Mirengoff wrote here about Obama nuclear policy advisor Joseph Cirincione. Paul's post was based on Gabriel Schoenfeld's discussion of "Obama's radioactive potato." Cirincione has now responded to Schoenfeld:
“I am not a top advisor to Senator Obama. I have never met the Senator. I have written occasional memos to his campaign and publicly endorsed his candidacy, but I am afraid there is no way I could be considered ‘Barack Obama’s top expert on matters nuclear.’”
Schoenfeld comments:
With all due respect to Joseph Cirincione, I stand by my claim that he serves as Senator Obama’s top adviser on matters nuclear and I am astonished that he would deny it.
In a March 12, 2008 article in the New Republic by Michelle Cottle in which he was extensively quoted, Cottle wrote that Cirincione “agreed last spring to advise the candidate on non-proliferation.”
If that statement is true, and I see no evidence that Cirincione has disputed it, then he is their adviser on nuclear proliferation, and indeed their top adviser unless he can point to a more senior nuclear expert advising the campaign.
Cirincione has been widely identified as an Obama adviser all over the blogsphere by publications spanning the political spectrum, from National Review to the Weekly Standard to the DailyKos, where he was even given the title “Informal National Security Adviser.” I did not find a disavowal from Cirincione in the comments section of that web document.
Stephen Zunes, chairman of the program in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, writing in Foreign Policy in Focus, described Cirincione as a “key Obama adviser.” Once again, I did not find a disavowal from Cirincione in the comments section of that web document.
Will the real top Obama nuclear advisor please stand up.
(See Schoenfeld's post for the links.) Perhaps nuclear policy is another one of those areas, like foreign policy, in which Obama esteems his own expertise sufficiently to dispense with the need for an adviser.
Posted by Scott at 8:41 AM | Permalink | E-mail this post to a friend |
An apologist for Syria shifts his ground
Yesterday, I noted that Joseph Cirincione, Barack Obama's go-to guy on nuclear issues, insisted in September 2001 that reports of North Korean involvement in developing a Syrian nuclear facility were "nonsense" cooked up by the Bush administration and Israel for their own purposes. One might think that being this wrongheaded -- lashing out against a valid report due to dislike of its sources and implications -- would disqualify Cirincione not just from his status in the Obama campaign, but also from being a "talking head" on the issue.
One would be wrong. Cirincione apparently remains Obama's adviser. This morning, moreover, NPR turned to Cirincione in its report on the North Korea-Syria collaboration. Given the state of the record, Cirincione no longer denied the existence or weapons-based purpose of the collaboration. His fall-back position was that the existence of the project didn't mean that Syria had, or was close to having, a nuclear capability.
But Cirincione latest brief against Israel is irrelevant. Unless, of course, one believes, as Cirincione (and Obama) might well, that Israel must wait until Syria is on the verge of developing a nuclear capabililty -- and thus must rely on uncertain assessments about this -- before it acts to protect its security.
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, the Syria-North Korea connection story hardly represents the first time Cirincione has shown his bias against Israel. As usual, Ed Lasky has the details. Cirincione appears to hold the view that the key to halting Iran's development of a nuclear arsenal is for Israel to give up on nuclear weapons.
Posted by Paul at 8:32 AM | Permalink | E-mail this post to a friend |
