US Vice-President Kamala Harris has welcomed support for her presidential election bid from hundreds of Washington warhawks.
Those endorsements came in the form of two letters. One, signed by former Republican government officials, congressmen and senators, and was released on September 18,
The other, carrying signatures of 700 national security leaders and former military officers, was published on September 22.
But many of those endorsements came from "odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions" who are "directly responsible for the counterproductive and failed US wars of the last 40 years" who Democrats have openly criticized, writes James W. Carden, a contributor for Washington DC-based think-tank the Quincy Institute of Responsible Statecraft.
After the publication of the first letter, left-wing US magazine The Nation raised the alarm over the Democratic hopeful embracing the support from "lifelong Republican and torture enthusiast Dick Cheney" and like-minded political figures.
Some of them, like neoconservative Eric S. Edelman, vice chair of the RAND Corporation's Committee on the National Defense Strategy, are now calling for increased defense spending to simultaneously confront China and Russia.
Old Republican hawks lambasted Trump for "unethical behavior and disregard for our Republic's time-tested principles of constitutional governance." But Carden asked why the signatories never voiced similar concerns during the Global War on Terror, which raised multiple ethical, legal and moral questions.
Apart from retired generals, flag officers and diplomats, the second letter's signatories also include many scandal-ridden politicians and former intelligence figures such as John Brennan, Victoria Nuland, Michael McFaul, Leon Panetta and Hillary Clinton.
The message from Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy elite is that they endorse Harris mostly because they do not want Donald Trump to return to the Oval Office.
"The Harris campaign appears willing to exploit this politically with the unfortunate by-product being the exclusion of any serious conversation about the odious ghosts of America’s past," Carden said.