Let's all join hands and sing the Coke song

WASHINGTON: President-elect Barack Obama's national security team will include two veteran Cold Warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state, General James Jones, the former NATO commander as national security adviser and Robert Gates, the current and future defense secretary - were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

The shift, which would come partly out of the military's huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states.

Whether they can make the change - one that Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best - "will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency," one of his senior advisers said recently. But the adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced "a rebalancing of America's national security portfolio" after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

Well, if this hadn't all been tried before I might be inclined to say what the hell, let's give it a shot.

But it has been tried. JFK thought of it first with the Peace Corps and Carter tried it and so did Clinton and in no case did it yield the kind of "safer world" payoff that was envisioned.

All if ever really does is telegraph to our enemies that we are weak and vulnerable and open to attack.

Of course there is a place for giving aid to other nations. Helping a former enemy rebuild after you have utterly defeated him on the battlefield as we did with Germany and Japan can pay tremendous benefits in later years as you get strong allies and trading partners. However the operative concept is "after you have utterly defeated them".

Since the primary war we are fighting now is not so much against a nation, Afghanistan or Iraq, but against a religious cult, Islam, we must first defeat that enemy before we extend the hand of friendship.

When Islam has been either abandoned or reformed in a major way because of its complete failure to deliver anything other than defeat, humiliation and death then we can help them pick up the pieces.

But all that is going to have to wait at least four years because we now have a president who isn't interested in winning the war but only in making nice with the enemy.

We are so screwed.