J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AFP/Getty Images Washington And The World Don’t Call Them ‘Obama Holdovers.’ Call Them Patriots. The attacks on apolitical career officials are misguided and wrong. I should know, because the ‘Bush holdovers’ I worked with made Obama’s foreign policy smarter.

Ilan Goldenberg is director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He previously worked at the Pentagon, State Department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The "alt-right" Twitter personality Mike Cernovich is at it again, with fresh accusations against the “Obama holdovers” who are supposedly undermining the Trump administration’s agenda. These attacks on apolitical career government officials show a deep misunderstanding of our government and undermine our institutions. I should know. As a political appointee early in the Obama administration, I worked with many “Bush holdovers”—and I can attest from personal experience that they are critical to achieving policy success.

My first job in government was as a junior political appointee on the Iran desk in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, starting in May 2009. Iran was a priority issue for President Barack Obama. He had distinguished himself from other Democratic candidates by arguing for engagement with adversaries, starting in the primaries in 2007 and culminating in the famous line from his first inaugural address: “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”


I showed up at the Pentagon a true believer in the president’s policy. I was convinced that if only the United States were to engage diplomatically with Iran, a solution could be found to address Iran’s nuclear program and perhaps other issues on which we disagreed. I also assumed our predecessors in the Bush administration were incompetent. I gave them little credit for laying the groundwork in building international support for U.N. sanctions. I distrusted their assertions that Iran was arming groups in Iraq that were killing American troops. I believed this was simply an excuse for the hawkish Bush administration to continue its disastrous policies in Iraq and turn attention on Iran. This dismissal of my predecessors is a common phenomenon of political transitions.

But on my first day in the job, I ran into a colleague on the Iran desk who held a very different view. He was a career government official. In today’s charged parlance you might call him a “Bush holdover.” He had been there to watch the Bush administration start building support for sanctions, and he had also spent a year in Iraq, where he saw firsthand how Iran’s destabilizing activities were resulting in the deaths of Americans. While I thought that more communication and engagement with Iran’s leadership would work things out, he used to say of the regime in Tehran: “They are not misunderstood people.”

We had to find a way to work together—writing joint memos that would on occasion reach the desk of the secretary of defense but more often go to one of the other multiple layers of policymakers in between. This was no easy task. It could be a deeply frustrating experience that sometimes devolved into shouting matches and bitter disagreements. But ultimately, I believe we made smarter recommendations.

My role as a political appointee was not to enforce ideological conformity. It was to provide the best advice I could. But there was a meaningful benefit to having a junior person buried deep in the bureaucracy whose ideas generally aligned with those of the president and his advisers—especially on a high-priority issue with political sensitivities like Iran. This ensured that the recommendations coming from deep in the bureaucracy were not completely untethered from the perspective of the political leadership.

My colleague’s role was also to provide the best advice he could. But his was informed by a different set of experiences based on his previous time in government, which had given him a more skeptical view of Iran and also a better sense of what had worked and what had failed.

Over time, our positions evolved and we increasingly found areas of agreement. Each of us also had to at times acknowledge that the other person had been right.

It turned out that my initial assumptions about engaging Iran were naive. In 2009, the Iranian government had little interest in a serious negotiation on terms that were acceptable to the United States—as my colleague had correctly understood from the start. Only after the Obama administration imposed tough new sanctions that genuinely threatened the regime’s survival was it able to change Iran’s calculus and bring it to the negotiating table in a serious manner in 2013, eventually leading to the Iran nuclear agreement two years later.

I was right about some things, too. Without Obama’s genuine attempts to engage, we would never have been able to demonstrate convincingly to our Asian and European partners, whose cooperation on sanctions was essential, that the problem was Iran—not the United States. This was always a limitation of the Bush administration’s Iran policy. More broadly, even though it took six years and I was long gone from the Iran desk, my initial instincts that a deal with Iran was possible were vindicated.

And my experience was hardly unique. At the National Security Council, the senior director responsible for Iran was a political appointee, while the director who reported to him was a career official from the State Department. And at the Deputies Committee meetings on Iran, where senior officials from across key government agencies met to coordinate policies and make recommendations to Cabinet secretaries and ultimately the president, there was a mix of career officials and political appointees. Key representatives in those meetings were appointed by President George W. Bush—including, for example, Bill Burns, who later, as deputy secretary of state, would go on to lead the delegation that opened the secret channel with Iran that eventually yielded the nuclear agreement.

This is how the system is designed to work. In my case, I may have had substantive disagreements with my civil servant colleagues, but I always knew they were patriots interested in seeing their country succeed and keeping the American people safe. And even though we may have had some deeply bitter disputes, mutual respect kept us grounded. I never once thought that any civil servant I worked with was actively trying to undermine the president or leaking information to the press.

Career civil servants deserve the same benefit of the doubt today. Many may disagree with President Donald Trump and much of what he stands for. Some have chosen to resign or may do so in the future. But those who have chosen to stay in government would love nothing more than to see the president conduct a successful foreign policy. They want to use their wisdom and hard-earned experience to help shape the policies of the new team. They deserve the opportunity to do that without having to deal with constant political attacks on their motives and character. So don’t call them “holdovers.” Call them what they are: patriots.