You overlooked General Scowcroft, General Jones, and General Petraeus, all of which have their connections to Obama. In fact, the vast majority of career military officers are Realists, as are the vast majority of career State dept people, or as the NeoCons like to say, Foggy Bottom, as if that somehow undermines the credibility of State.
And as it is pointed out in #56, the military supports START.
Shutting down the State Department would really undermine its credibility and its corruption and its knee-jerk anti-American habits and agendas as well.
If the State Department were not chock full of all too many lifer diployakkers whose policies suggest a private life in which their bottoms have more uses than God intended, it might not be as objectionable. No likelihood of stiffer wrists in the foreseeable future. Shut it down. Turn the offices into a museum of Marxism-Leninism or a Mapplethorpe Photo Gallery or a Gourmet Culinary Institute or a training center for first class concierges or a center for the study of alternative lifestyle "preferences" or a National Lotto HQ since that would be a metaphor for this unilateral disarmament crapola sooooo fashionable among the fashionables and the Putin and Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez buttock-smooching social set.
If you are right about Petraeus, he was probably corrupted at Princeton which is a strange alma mater for a ranking military man who actually has fought. I don't recall ever hearing of battlefield exploits of Scowcroft and Jones. Do they compare in that respect to Patton and "Bombs Away" with Curt Lemay??? I didn't think so. Were Scowcroft and Jones spending their careers behind closed doors and far from battle, hamstringing the Pattons and the LeMays of their generation to thwart military accomplishment in the name of keeping our enemies happy and confident and in business???? Was Scowcroft the genius who advised Bush the Elder to leave Saddam in power???
Foreign policy is simpler than the greedy pampered suppose. Q. What is flat, black and glows in the dark??? A. Teheran within 24 hours after Reagan takes his first presidential oath if those hostages are not on the plane, in the air and on their way home ten minutes after he puts his hand on the Bible. Ironically, of course, the hostages were mostly diployakkers from the US Embassy but they were citizens of a sort and examples need to be made. The Ayatollah Khomeini decided to put them on the plane lest Teheran become a nuclear excavation site.
For the next nineteen months, Netanyahu is likely the only Western leader with the brass to do what needs doing and who knows how to wear the pants of a free leader of free people. Mama Grizzly can join with him on January, 2013. We must then keep the pathetic memory of what it was like to live under Comrade O constantly before our public as a guarantee that we never elect Comrade O's ilk again and also see that the alternative is not the New World Order surrender monkeys of the Percival Balderdash the 32nd set whom you admire so much.
As to the link in #56, it would appear that the politically ambitious whores at Defense under Gates and Comrade O are “only following orders”, a defense that did not hold water at Nuremberg or ever since. Maybe the next “Defense” Secretary will be Noam Chomsky or Ramsay Clarke or Bill Ayres or Bernardine Doehrn. Each is precisely as much a defender of our nation as are Kissinger and Hillary and your other establishmentarian love objects.