Obama's Brain Trust Taking Shape

WASHINGTON — When it comes to foreign affairs, Senator Obama's inner circle of advisers includes a Swahili-speaking Air Force general he met on a trip to Africa; a 30-year-old speechwriter who helped draft the final report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, and President Clinton's first national security adviser, who in 2005 converted to Judaism under the tutelage of the Navy's chief Jewish chaplain.

Those advisers in order are Scott Gration, Ben Rhodes, and Anthony Lake. They are part of a nine-person team, in contact every day, often by e-mail. The team develops policy positions, clears language for use in comments to the press, and prepares the Democratic candidate who has won all the primaries since Super Tuesday for a dangerous world and a global war.

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Who advises Mr. Obama and whom the candidate would appoint to key foreign policy posts if elected president has raged as the topic of intense speculation on the Internet and through often anonymous e-mails warning Jewish voters that Mr. Obama's team may be neutral or indeed hostile to Israel.

In a series of interviews with the campaign's foreign policy advisers and supporters, as well as critics, the national security team that emerges around Mr. Obama is one that is in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. The senator's advisers favor a withdrawal from Iraq and see it as a distraction from the wider war on Al Qaeda; they have developed a detailed policy on how to exit the country. The campaign favors high-level diplomatic engagement with Syria and Iran, but in the context of changing the behavior of these regimes. And the foreign policy team, like the candidate, does not support pressuring Israel into negotiations with Hamas.

The nine-member team funnels input to Denis McDonough, an Obama campaign staff member who briefs the candidate. A broader group of 250 advisers are divided into groups dealing with the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Russia-Europe, defense, veterans, counterterrorism, democracy and development, and multilateral institutions. On average each of these groups has 20 people. The Obama campaign has declined to release the names of all the participants, saying that some of them are volunteering their time while serving in jobs at government agencies and nonprofits that don't want to be publicly associated with a partisan political campaign.

One reason why some of the pro-Israel community have been comfortable with Mr. Obama's stance is the presence of Daniel Shapiro, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat from Florida. Mr. Shapiro, who leads the Middle East group, spearheaded efforts in Congress to designate al Manar, the satellite television channel for Hezbollah, as a foreign terrorist organization. He sends his children to the Jewish Primary Day School in Washington, D.C.

The lead American negotiator during the Oslo peace process, Ambassador Dennis Ross, who has provided advice to Mr. Obama's campaign but does not consider himself to be an adviser, said he saw no difference on Israel policy between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama.

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. And the campaign's wider circle includes two people, a former national security adviser to President Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and a former President Clinton aide, Robert Malley, who have come under wider scrutiny. The campaign says the candidate has not spoken in the past four months with Mr. Brzezinski, who led a delegation in the Middle East that met with President Assad of Syria. As for Mr. Malley, the campaign says he is not a formal adviser, but has provided advice.

Another adviser who has come under scrutiny in recent weeks is Samantha Power, a professor at Harvard University and an expert in genocide and international law. Ms. Power was one of Mr. Obama's first foreign policy tutors when he came to the Senate in 2005, where she began volunteering in his office after a meeting at a Washington steakhouse. The campaign has called her a foreign policy adviser, though not an adviser specifically on the Middle East.

Commentary Magazine, the National Review, and the American Thinker have run critical blog posts about Ms. Power for series of comments she has made regarding Israel.

For example, on May 30, 2007, Ms. Power was quoted in an interview posted on the Kennedy School Web site as saying, "Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the 'national interest' as a whole is defined and pursued. Look at the degree to which Halliburton and several of the private security and contracting firms invested in the 2004 political campaigns and received very lucrative contracts in the aftermath of the U.S. takeover of Iraq. Also, America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive."

In an interview yesterday, Ms. Power said, "This quote is taken out of context. I was talking about the way Halliburton skewed U.S. decision-making on the ground in Iraq. I have never suggested and do not believe that the U.S. went to war in Iraq owing to Israeli pressure or influence."

Ms. Power also said that she did not believe it was possible to send American forces to Israel and the Palestinian territories without the consent of both parties.

As for the strategic understanding of the American-Israeli relationship, one of the campaign's most senior advisers, Anthony Lake, said he saw the two countries as sharing a common enemy. "You can analytically make distinctions among them. Both Hezbollah and Hamas are more focused on Israel than the United States. They all have different agendas, but they all use terrorism and they all look at the United States as their enemies too," he said.

The approach of the Obama campaign hews closely to the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton report, co-authored by Ben Rhodes, Mr. Obama's 30-year old foreign-policy speechwriter. The Baker-Hamilton report called for engaging the Iranians and Syrians and winding down American combat operations in Iraq, though it also endorsed a temporary surge to enhance security. President Bush and Senator McCain both rejected the main recommendations of the report, which they saw as a way to manage defeat.

Mr. Lake said that he saw advantages to entering discussions with Syria in part to break its "unnatural alliance" with Iran. "The Bush administration's doctrine of refusing to talk or insisting the other side has to make all the concessions before they start talking with you, is naïve," he said.

The prospect that President Obama would seek discussions with Iran worries some observers. A former Israeli ambassador to America, Daniel Ayalon, said in a telephone interview, "What worries me, I have looked into his position papers and all of that. He describes the ayatollah regime as a Hitler-like regime. I think he is very right to see it as a Hitler-like regime. If he sees it this way, why would he negotiate with a Hitler type regime?"

Mr. Lake said in response, "I would argue what is important here are results, for the sake of our security and Israel's security. You don't achieve them by posturing. I have utter confidence — and I have been in many negotiations — in Barack Obama's ability to be a very, very tough negotiator."

A supporter of Mr. Obama's, the editor in chief of the New Republic, Martin Peretz, yesterday chalked up concerns about the senator's foreign policy with concerns about the Democratic Party. "The weaknesses of the Obama foreign policy advisory team are a result of a contagion in the Democratic party itself," he said. "It is not just a failure of understanding about Israel's predicament, but a failure of understanding about the career of freedom in the world."

On just the question of Mr. Obama's support for Israel, however, the president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Howard Friedman, minimized any differences between the candidates. "All of the leading candidates, Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain, and Governor Huckabee, have demonstrated their support for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship," Mr. Friedman said.

The rabbi of a synagogue across the street from the Obama family residence in Hyde Park, Chicago, Arnold Jacob Wolf, said that the senator was in fact too hawkish on Israel. "In my opinion he has been too strong. I belong to the Peace Now group and he doesn't. He is defensive of Israel in ways I wouldn't be, mostly the occupation," the rabbi, who says he has known Mr. Obama for 10 years, said.