Clinton has powered her way to the top of the Democratic pack, establishing a 33-point lead in one poll last week over Barack Obama, her nearest rival. She raised $7 million more than Obama in the last quarter and attracted more individual contributors than the Illinois senator, proving her popularity with grassroots Democrats. With Clinton looking the near-inevitable nominee, Bush officials intend to hold her to her promise to be tough on defense and national security. Robert Gates, the defense secretary, is hoping to establish a bipartisan consensus on defense that will last beyond next year's election.In the clearest sign of a shift in gear, Gates is to appoint John Hamre, a former official in President Bill Clinton's administration, to chair the Defense Policy Board once led by Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative advocate of the invasion of Iraq. The board's job will be to prepare for the transition to a new administration in 2008, according to a Pentagon spokesman.
Hamre, who was Bill Clinton's deputy defense secretary in the 1990s, has been highly critical of the conduct of the war on terror. In The Washington Post last year he wrote: "The policies that led to Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, secret renditions and warrantless wiretaps have undermined America's towering moral authority."
In common with Gates, Hamre is skeptical about the value of the Iraq troop surge. He recently served on a bipartisan commission on Iraq chaired by James Jones, the former NATO commander. In evidence to Congress last month, Hamre said: "Absent political reconciliation, it's hard to see how this [the war] ends well."
However, Hamre, who heads the influential Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, also argued that America "will be hurt if we crawl out or run out of Iraq." He believes the next president should maintain a vital but scaled-down presence in the country in order to oversee the training of Iraqi security forces and to "direct operations against known bad guys."
Lawrence Korb, a defense expert at the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank, described Hamre's imminent appointment as a "brilliant move" which would mark a dramatic break with Perle's era. "Most people think the next president will be a Democrat and Gates, who has been around for a long time, believes it is his job to ensure that national security is not affected," Korb said.
Clinton has been sidestepping calls to pull US troops out of Iraq if she wins, sticking to a broader promise to begin a phased withdrawal. In a recent television interview, the New York senator refused to state that all US combat troops would leave Iraq by the end of her first term in office. She voted in the Senate last month to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization.
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World
