Lugar will back Colin Powell approach
Lugar assumes Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Unlike the committee’s current ranking Republican, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who is retiring, Lugar is more likely to support the State Department’s approach in its constant intramural battles with the hawks at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration.
“Lugar will be dreadful,” said a prominent foreign policy conservative who asked not to be identified. “He is a conventionally minded apparatchik of the establishment.”….
…”I don’t want to alarm the Republican right, but there is very little Dick Lugar and I disagree on,” said the current committee chairman, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), who will hand over his gavel to Lugar when the new Congress meets next year and the Republicans take control of the Senate. “He is the most informed Republican in Congress on foreign affairs, and if I can’t be chairman there is no one who I would have rather be chairman.” [Blog Left: Critical Interventions]