While Peter Beinert is quite possibly correct to predict that Barack Obama’s foreign affairs nominations are meant to protect his right flank so that he can safely move to the left, he doesn’t address one topic that Obama raised in the campaign. Barack Obama said, quite often, that we needed to change the kind of mentality in Washington that got us into Iraq in the first place. Now, everyone has the capacity to learn. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton have presumably adjusted their foreign policy views in light of the debacle in Iraq, as well as the ensuing financial crisis. Some mindsets are changed without necessarily changing the people that are in charge. But the real concern on the left is that Obama is filling out his foreign policy team almost exclusively with people whose instincts were wrong on Iraq. That is not promising if the goal is to change the paradigm through which Washington views its foreign policy options.

There is no doubt that there is value in staffing up with some hawks and some ardent pro-Israeli thinkers if your goal is to move in a more dovish direction. It is wise to protect the right flank. But the Democrats run a risk. Since at least the time of McCarthy, Democrats have consistently found it necessary to protect their right flank, which is why they tend to select Republicans to run the Defense Department. It is a structural feature of American politics that the right wing will attack the Democrats as being soft on defense, even going so far as to concoct intelligence and statistics to make their case.

We saw this happen first with the whole ‘Who lost China’ debate, then the ‘Let’s Nuke China’ debate, then the ‘Let’s invade Cuba’ debate, then the ‘Let’s invade Vietnam’ debate, then the ‘The Soviets have established military superiority’ debate, and finally the ‘Democrats are soft on terror’ debate. At some point, we have to stand up and beat back this structural deficit.

There is no magic wand that will solve this problem. The Republicans will continue to make these attacks. And one way to deal with the attacks is to bring in reasonable Republicans, like Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, and Richard Lugar, and marginalize the crazies. But this comes with a price tag. Moreover, staffing up with Hawks, even moderate Hawks, is going to determine that the kind of advice Obama is getting has a Hawkish bias. And it is a Hawkish bias that led us into Iraq.

You can see the tension here, which is why I continue to advise the Obama transition team to make sure they have some George Ball-types on their foreign policy team. Many people think Obama is selecting centrists and hawks because he agrees with them. Beinert suggests he is picking them because he doesn’t agree with them. But even if Beinert is right, Obama needs allies in his inner counsels. That is where the left is concerned. We want the mindset that got us into Iraq to change, and we don’t trust that that will happen if the only mind that reflects that change is Obama’s.