Dont Call Them 'Obama Holdovers'. Call Them Patriots.
The attacks on apolitical career officials are misguided and wrong. I should know, because the ‘Bush holdovers’ I worked with made Obama’s foreign policy smarter.
By ILAN GOLDENBERG August 30, 2017
The alt-right Twitter personality Mike Cernovich is at it again, with fresh Link to tweet
" target="_blank">accusations against the “Obama holdovers” who are supposedly undermining the Trump administration’s agenda. These attacks on apolitical career government officials show a deep misunderstanding of our government and undermine our institutions. I should know. As a political appointee early in the Obama administration, I worked with many “Bush holdovers”—and I can attest from personal experience that they are critical to achieving policy success.
My first job in government was as a junior political appointee on the Iran desk in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, starting in May 2009. Iran was a priority issue for President Barack Obama. He had distinguished himself from other Democratic candidates by arguing for engagement with adversaries, starting in the primaries in 2007 and culminating in the famous line from his first inaugural address: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
I showed up at the Pentagon a true believer in the president’s policy. I was convinced that if only the United States were to engage diplomatically with Iran, a solution could be found to address Iran’s nuclear program and perhaps other issues on which we disagreed. I also assumed our predecessors in the Bush administration were incompetent. I gave them little credit for laying the groundwork in building international support for U.N. sanctions. I distrusted their assertions that Iran was arming groups in Iraq that were killing American troops. I believed this was simply an excuse for the hawkish Bush administration to continue its disastrous policies in Iraq and turn attention on Iran. This dismissal of my predecessors is a common phenomenon of political transitions.
But on my first day in the job, I ran into a colleague on the Iran desk who held a very different view. He was a career government official. In today’s charged parlance you might call him a “Bush holdover.” He had been there to watch the Bush administration start building support for sanctions, and he had also spent a year in Iraq, where he saw firsthand how Iran’s destabilizing activities were resulting in the deaths of Americans. While I thought that more communication and engagement with Iran’s leadership would work things out, he used to say of the regime in Tehran: “They are not misunderstood people.”
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/30/donald-trump-obama-holdovers-215557?lo=ap_f1
