Bunker Mentality

Elliott Abrams is very worried about the course of U.S. foreign policy and advises his comrades to gird themselves for a protracted battle against President Obama:

To those who do care about the interests of this country and its friends and allies, it should sound like a call to arms, leading us to ask how successful struggles to change America's foreign policy were waged in the past. In the 1970s, the headquarters of resistance to détente and its associated blunders was Room 135 in the Old Senate Office Building, which housed the foreign policy and national security staff of Democratic senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson.

I worked on Jackson's personal staff, next door. We called Room 135 "the Bunker" because the senator and "Scoop's Troops" were regularly assaulted by all right-thinking, liberal, cosmopolitan, Establishment voices.

Missing from his article is any explanation, or even a passing reflection, on why he and his fellow neoconservatives are formulating policy from a bunker instead of the White House. A sustained period of self-reflection before mounting the barricades might be worth it. Sadly, that does not seem to be in the offing.