Washignton DC, CR News

In a statement issued by the campaign, Republican front runner Governor Mitt Romney appointed an elaborate national security advisory team with about 50 well-known personalities as a foreign policy and national security advisory structure that mimics the White House's National Security Council, with teams of experts assigned to working groups on functional and regional issues. Link [ here ]

According to Foreign Policy 15 "special advisors" would be the core of a shadow national security Council. They include Cofer Black, Christopher Burnham, Michael Chertoff, Eliot Cohen, Norm Coleman, John Danilovich, Paula Dobriansky, Eric Edelman, Michael Hayden, Kerry Healey, Kim Holmes, Robert Joseph
Robert Kagan, John Lehman and Walid Phares. Link [ here ]

CNN described Romney's move as "assembling a top notch Foreign Policy team." Indeed, the members of the shadow council includes former senators, cabinet secretaries, academics and security and intelligence bureaucrats. In an instable world which is causing security challenges and economic crises, Romney called on the "top experts and practitioners in the field." Link [ HERE ]

Romney assigned the Middle East to three personalities: Marry Beth Long, Co-Chair a Senior Vice President at Neural IQ Government Services; Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs (2007-2009), Meghan O’Sullivan, Co-Chair, Lecturer at Kennedy School of Government; Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan (2004-2007) and Walid Phares Professor of Global Strategies at the National Defense University in Washington; Member of the Advisory Board of the Task Force on Future Terrorism at the Department of Homeland Security (2006-2007).

The "Greater Middle East" advisors will head sub committees on the sub regions North Africa, Levant, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as Sudan. It is to note that Governor Romney will advance a new alternative platform for the Middle East US Policy based on alliances and promotion of democracy.

Professor Walid Phares, one of the three co-chairs, is a native of Lebanon and emigrated to the US in 1990. He has since been a professor of Middle East studies in Florida and now in Washington DC and has authored a number of books on the region and its various ideological forces. He published last year a prescient book The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East, where he predicted the uprisings of 2011. Phares serves as an advisor to members of the US Congress.