Bush's Hawks Are Back

Bush-Era hawks are back! Many have joined the teams of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry to offer their expertise in foreign policy and national security. I find it pretty awesome that CIA legend and former Blackwater executive Cofer Black is joining Mitt Romney's team. There's some info on him in Robert Young Pelton's book Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. (About private military contractors). Just to show you what kind of a guy Cofer Black is, here are some of the incidents/quotes he's famous for:

"When we're through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs" he said. It was an image of death that left a lasting impression on a number of war cabinet ministers. Black became known in Bush's inner circle as the "flies on the eyeballs guy"... Black's enthusiasm was infectious ... Powell, for one, saw that Bush was tired of rhetoric. The President wanted to kill somebody.

"We're in a war," Black told the Russians. "We're coming. Regardless of what you do, we're coming anyway." He knew Afghanistan was in their sphere of influence and they would be queasy. "At the very least we want you to look away." He did not want the Russians trying to gum up CIA operations.
The Russians indicated they would help and certainly not obstruct. One noted that Afghanistan was ambush heaven, where the guerrilla fighters had demolished the Russian army. "With regret," the Russian said, "I have to say that you're really going to get the hell kicked out of you".

"We're going to kill them," Black said. "We're going to put their heads on sticks. We're going to rock their world."

Just check out his Wiki page. Anyway, from Business Week, here's a rundown of who's joining whose team...

After the jump!


From Business Week
Romney’s Team

Romney’s advisers include Joseph; Cofer Black, a former head of Central Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism center and executive of the security firm Blackwater, now Xe Services; Meghan O’Sullivan, a Bloomberg View columnist and former White House official who oversaw Iraq and Afghanistan policy; Eliot Cohen, director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a former counselor at Rice’s State Department; Dov Zakheim, the former Pentagon comptroller; and John Lehman, Ronald Reagan’s Navy secretary.

Perry Advisers

Perry’s list of informal advisers includes Feith; Bolton; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later ambassador to Afghanistan; and Daniel Blumenthal, former Pentagon international security affairs director for China and Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the campaign who asked not to be named.

Victoria Coates, a former research associate to Rumsfeld and an art historian, is a Perry foreign policy adviser, and Emily Domenech, a former Pentagon trip planner, is a defense adviser, the campaign said Nov. 2.

Herman Cain

Cain, former chief executive officer of the Godfather’s Pizza Inc. chain, has consulted retired ambassadors and defense officials including Bolton. He had a 90-minute breakfast meeting in New York with Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, the candidate’s spokesman, retired Navy Commander J.D. Gordon.

Extending Reagan

Cain’s world view is “an extension of Reagan’s philosophy of peace through strength and clarity,” and he intends to lay out his views soon in a white paper, Gordon said. A Pentagon public affairs officer from 2005 to 2009 and a spokesman on Guantanamo Bay detention operations, Gordon said he was also Cain’s main foreign policy adviser.

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You can read the entire article here