It’s good to know that really smart people are running things over at CNN (h/t: Think Progress)

It’s as if CNN learned everything they think they need to know from “Gone Quiet,” that horrible episode of The West Wing where Hal Holbrook, playing “the Assistant Secretary of State” for Curmudgeonly Old American Affairs, lectures President Bartlett.  Memo to CNN (and Aaron Sorkin, for that matter):  there are something like forty Assistant Secretaries of State, and none of them have anything to do with domestic constituencies.

This just demonstrates the degree to which the MSM doesn’t understand the most basic mechanics mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy.  But then again, they never had to learn any of this under Bush, did they?

Related posts

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• Madam Ambassador
• As If Anyone Cares
• Transition Watch: Mona Sutphen
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The NYT is reporting that President-elect Obama picked his three key national security advisors because they share his view that we need a fundamental shift in the direction of U.S. foreign policy:

[A]ll three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. 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 Mr. 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 the 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.

Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work rather than counterterrorism, even though President Bush repeatedly promised such a shift, starting in a series of speeches in late 2005. But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr. Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home. . . .

“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem,” Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, said in an interview on Sunday.

“During the campaign the then-senator invested a lot of time reaching out to retired military and also younger officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to draw on lessons learned,” Mr. McDonough said. “There wasn’t a meeting that didn’t include a discussion of the need to strengthen and integrate the other tools of national power to succeed against unconventional threats. It is critical to a long-term successful and sustainable national security strategy in the 21st century.”

This is nothing less than a revolutionary change in how the United States thinks about and interacts with the rest of the world.  Obama’s vision, as I’ve noted before, is both pragmatic and idealistic:  he sees the United States as both a leader and a model, but also recognizes that it cannot be that without the necessary resources:

[A]n Obama administration is likely to pursue a foreign policy based on sound strategic principles and coherent tactics.  Realism should trump ideology, and principles should trump interests. Call it pragmatic idealism, if you must apply a label.

In addition, an Obama administration will repair America’s disastrously dysfunctional foreign policy apparatus:  providing the State Department with the resources it needs; streamlining foreign assistance; reestablishing a robust and proactive public diplomacy; and clarifying the overlapping roles of State, NSC, Defense, and Homeland Security.  It will emphasize both innovation and results, rewarding creativity and encouraging critical thinking.

As the Times notes, both Jones and Gates have gone out of their way to speak out for these kinds of changes.  Clinton doesn’t have a similar track record, but I would be very surprised were she not to share their views.

But make no mistake: this will not be an easy task.  The military-industrial complex and its allies in Congress will resist any attempt to redirect resources away from DOD (in fact, they’re already trying).  Reform of the rest of the national security apparatus — particularly State, USAID, and DHS — will take considerable time and nearly infinite patience.  Reestablishing some sort of public diplomacy capacity with the personnel, resources, and independence necessary to accomplish an extraordinarily difficult mission will take even longer.

This is an enormous undertaking.  To use a popular cliché, Obama is trying to turn a supertanker, and that will take time.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

One last observation:  if the NYT story is correct, Hillary’s move makes a lot more sense than it did before.  Obama is tasking her with nothing less than a total overhaul of the way the United States conducts foreign policy — the first such effort since Harry Truman tasked George Marshall and Dean Acheson to modernize American national security policy in the aftermath of the Second World War.

If she pulls it off, she’ll go down in history, along with Madison, Monroe, Seward, Marshall and Acheson, as one of the greatest Secretaries of State in American history.  And in the process, she just might lay the groundwork for a future Presidential run — and do it with a record of accomplishment that she could not have matched had she spent the next eight years in the Senate.

This is going to be fun to watch.

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• Transition Watch: Anger in the Ranks
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• The Fake Controversy over Samantha Power
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Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell is the definitive study of the shifts in U.S. policy toward genocide over the last half of the 20th Century.  Her most recent book, Chasing the Flame, looks at the career of the late Sergio Viera de Mello, who was killed by a 2003 suicide bomb attack on the UN Compound in Baghdad.

Power is one of the smartest, most able thinkers out there when it comes not only to human rights issues but aso foreign policy in general.  She was one of Obama’s earliest foreign policy advisors and she is is an excellent choice for his transition team.

God forbid that any of that actually would be reported by the MSM.  Noooo — all they want to talk about is that she once said something mean about Hillary:

Samantha Power, the Harvard professor who was forced to resign from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign last spring after calling Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton “a monster,” is now advising the president-elect on transition matters relating to the State Department — which Clinton is slated to head. . . [S]he is part of a team that is likely to work directly with Clinton, a potentially awkward situation for the two women.

Okay, let me get this straight:  Obama is smart and pragmatic in asking Hillary, who said plenty of not-so-nice things about the next President when they were rivals, to be Secretary of State.  But Hillary is supposedly incapable of acting in the same way when one one person working on the transition at State happened to say something unfortunate about her six months ago.

This is ridiculous.  If Hillary is who Obama thinks she is, she will pick the best and brightest to be on her team.  In the case of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, she would be hard-pressed to find someone better than Power to serve as Assistant Secretary (assuming, of course, that Power wants the job).  But even if she does pick someone else, it doesn’t mean she won’t rely on Power to advise her during the transition.

One other thing:  they at least could understand how the transition works.  Power is a member of the Agency Review Team for the State Department.  There are two team leads (Tom Donilon and Wendy Sherman), and twenty-three people on the team (including some working out of USAID).  In addition, there is a separate Policy Review Team, of which Power is not a member.  So she is one out of something like 100 people working on national security issues, and one of roughly 30 or 40 working on State and USAID issues.

Yes, she is likely to be in the room with Hillary, particularly during briefings.  But this isn’t High School Musical — it’s not like they’re going to have lockers next to each other or something.  Does WaPo think they’re going to see each other in the cafeteria and reenact the gang fight from West Side Story?  They’re adults, for crying out loud.  They got over this a long time ago.

But in Washington — or at least the Washington found only in the MSM’s fevered fantasies — the titillation of potential conflict matters more than policy expertise. This is the Washington that reports on Rahm Emanuel’s “dead, dead!” monologue as if no one has ever seen the Godfather movies.  This is the Washington that assumes that the old Obama-Hillary rivalry means that they can’t work together.  This is the Washington that would rather remind the world of something someone said (and almost immediately apologized for) six months ago rather than focus on her record as an analyst and thinker.

This isn’t news, it’s gossip and speculation.  The entire story is predicated on the possibility that Hillary might find it awkward to have Power on her team.  There’s not a single shred of evidence that there’s any tension, or even if they’ve met (now or earlier). As such, it belongs in WaPo’s “Reliable Source” gossip column, not in the front section.

Photo:  Angela Radulescu via Flickr, using a CC license.

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Even if you read this morning’s NYT story about the rapprochement between Obama and Hillary Clinton, you might have missed one little sentence toward the beginning of the story:

By this past Thursday, when Mr. Obama reassured Mrs. Clinton that as secretary of state she would have direct access to him and could select her own staff, the wooing was complete.

Last week, I raised the question of whether this would happen and what the impact would be on both the Obama-Clinton relationship and the morale of those in the foreign policy community who chose to support Obama rather than Clinton:

During the primaries, the Clinton campaign asked foreign policy experts to remain “exclusive” to Hillary (meaning they could not also offer advice to other candidates).  That’s not an unreasonable position, even if the other leading candidates (including Obama) chose not to follow suit.  I know many people in the foreign policy community who volunteered for the Clinton campaign because they thought she was the best candidate.  But I also know a few who, because of ambition, felt that they had to work for her even though they preferred another candidate.  When Obama ultimately won, all of them were welcomed by his campaign and integrated into Obama’s existing campaign apparatus.

If Hillary were to become Secretary of State, I presume that she, like most Secretaries, would be given significant leeway in picking most (if not all) of her senior advisors (meaning in the case of State the two Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and those Assistant Secretary postions not assigned to career foreign service officers).  It would be logical (and not unreasonable) to conclude that she probably would favor those who served her during the primaries.

But doing so could create two problems.  First, the team of rivals could turn into rival fiefdoms, with Obama supporters dominating the NSC (and Defense) and Clinton supporters dominating State.  Given the fact that the next Administration urgently needs to reintegrate State into existing foreign policy structures (and give it the resources both to achieve its mission and play a more robust role in intra-agency negotiations), Obama needs to end existing inter-agency rivalries, not create new ones.

Second, there was no love lost among the two camps’ advisors during the primaries.  The Clintons attacked those they viewed as disloyal (such as Bill Richardson and Gregory Craig), which angered many in the Obama campaign.  In addition, I heard from more than one friend that they were warned that they could forget about a role in a Clinton administration should they not support Hillary during the primaries.  Given those realities, Obama risks angering those who did support him, and some of his supporters may regard Hillary’s likely selection of her loyalists to senior posts as a betrayal.

It’s too early to say whether the issue of competing fiefdoms will pose a problem, but it’s already pretty clear that Obama foreign policy types, particularly those who chose to support him back when he was far from a sure thing, are not at all happy with this development.

Even though it’s a Sunday, I’ve already heard from several bitter and angry friends.  They are wondering why they stuck their neck out twenty months ago only to see Hillary’s supporters get the plum foreign policy jobs.  At the time, they supported Obama not to get a job (after all, Hillary looked like a near-lock then) but because they sincerely believed that Obama represented a new and fresh approach.  Most knew that they were taking a big chance — after all, they had been warned of the consequences were they not to support Hillary. (And again, I believe that most of those who supported Hillary did so because they thought she was the best person for the job.)

My friends would be less than human if they did not want some reward for the chance they took.  Now, they feel, their payoff is to see the key jobs at State go to those who played it safe.

Although it’s true that Hillary might appoint some Obama loyalists to her team, most of my friends don’t think that’s going to happen.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has been hearing such things:  over the weekend, several stories reported astonishment, anger, unhappiness, and bad morale within the Obama foreign policy ranks.  The Telegraph (UK):

[A] little after lunch on Wednesday two Obama aides went to a local coffee shop to talk. Both were veterans of the campaign. . . . [T]hey agreed on one thing: “He’s making a mistake.” As one of the participants told a friend later that night: “She’ll do a good job but she’ll do it for herself, not for Barack. I can’t bear the drama again.”

Then there’s this anonymous Obama team member, quoted by Michael Crowley over at TNR:

With General Jim Jones looking a strong bet for National Security Advisor, Hillary Clinton slated for State, and Bob Gates staying on at DOD, it appears increasingly likely that the three senior foreign policy positions in the Obama Administration will be filled by people who were not active Obama supporters during the campaign.

Moreover, these principals are likely to bring their own hanger-ons – Hillary alone is likely to absorb into State the foreign policy advisors from her primary campaign, not necessarily their Obama counterparts.  So how do you think that makes the “Gang of 300” who staffed Candidate Obama on foreign policy issues, wrote white papers, served as surrogates for him, etc. during the long campaign feel?

I still believe that Hillary would be smart to pick an Obama loyalist to the Deputy Secretary position.  As I’ve noted, if Obama can reach out to his rival, why can’t she do the same?

I have to wonder what both Susan Rice and Samantha Power are thinking.  After all, they were two of the earliest to support Obama.  Now Rice is likely to get no better than Deputy National Security Advisor and Power may not get anything at all — does anyone seriously think that Hillary would want someone who called her a “monster” to serve as her Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor?

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Last week I aired my complaint about the State Department’s Dipnote blog. A commenter wrote “I don’t think it’s that bad, but it’s definitely not ‘edgy.’” OK. But I want the State Department to do so much more with these powerful online megaphones.

Think about the “Obama is a ‘House Negro’” comment from Al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri the other day. The comment tore up the political blogosphere. Observers suggested the comment exposes a flaw in Al Qaeda strategy since the racism of the comment could hurt AQ in part of the world it is counting on for growth (Sudan, Kenya, etc.)

Furthermore, Spencer Ackerman writes:

With an American president as loathed as George W. Bush around the world, it’s easy for Al Qaeda to portray the U.S. as venal and stupid and brutish as he’s proven. Obama complicates the narrative significantly: the very color of his skin, precisely what Al Qaeda mocks, symbolizes America’s willingness to change. That’s exactly what Al Qaeda fears most.

Ilan Goldberg adds:

[AQ] paints the United States as an evil empire that oppresses its own minorities and has little regard for the rest of the world. Al Qaeda uses these types of narratives to raise funds and recruit. [snip] The election of the first African American President, one with a Muslim father, flies in the face of this narrative. It shows America as an open and tolerant society - not the oppressive empire Al Qaeda would like to portray.

People… these are the moments “public diplomacy” is made for. Zawahiri has served up a giant softball and all we have to do is jack it out of the park. Matt Armstrong makes the case here.

So, I cover my eyes, click on the link to Dipnote, peak out between my fingers, and see this: And Twitter That: Public Diplomacy in Moldova. Hmmm…

To be fair… the newest post on DipNote is from Mark Lagon (one of the highest ranking people I have seen post on DipNote). And he covers a very serious topic: Human Trafficking in the Middle East.

But still….

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Although much of the coverage of Obama’s new White House team has focused on the fact that most of the appointees so far have considerable Hill experience.  As Ezra Klein noted yesterday, “This is not an administration that will lack the cell phone numbers of key congressional players.”

Klein goes on to note an outlier among the Hill vets:  Mona Sutphen, who was named one of two White House Deputy Chiefs of Staff:

Sutphen is a slightly odder case — she’s a former foreign service office who has been a manager at Sandy Berger’s consultancy and recently co-authored The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise.

I’m actually rather excited about this appointment.  Suthpen is one of the smartest, most able thinkers on foreign policy out there, representing a new generation whose defining years were not the Cold War or 9/11, but rather the Clinton Administration (h/t Yglesias):

The Next American Century represents, in many ways, a distillation of the Obama worldview:  America as a central player but not necessarily the dominant one.  As I’ve noted elsewhere,

[A]n Obama administration is likely to pursue a foreign policy based on sound strategic principles and coherent tactics.  Realism [will] trump ideology, and principles [will] trump interests. Call it pragmatic idealism, if you must apply a label.

In addition, an Obama administration will repair America’s disastrously dysfunctional foreign policy apparatus:  providing the State Department with the resources it needs; streamlining foreign assistance; reestablishing a robust and proactive public diplomacy; and clarifying the overlapping roles of State, NSC, Defense, and Homeland Security.  It will emphasize both innovation and results, rewarding creativity and encouraging critical thinking.

As far as I know, there’s never been a former (or current) foreign service officer who has served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff.  And since Midwest already has violated my Sorkintorium, I’ll note that no major character on The West Wing focused on foreign policy — that’s just not the way it was done back then (or in the Bush White House for that matter).

Unfortunately, it also points to the sad reality of a foreign service career in this day and age — talented mid-level officers are far more likely to leave for greener pastures than stick around for twenty years trying to get an Ambassadorship.  Had Sutphen stayed at State, she would be, most likely, a Deputy Chief of Mission somewhere, on the cusp of finding out whether she had been accepted into the Senior Foreign Service.

To put it bluntly, which would you rather be at a similar point in your career:  DCM in the Kyrgyz Republic or Deputy Chief of Staff to the most exciting political figure in thirty years?

One other note:  Sutphen once served in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), my old stomping grounds (we did not overlap).  Given the fact that, under both Clinton and Bush, DRL was viewed as a career-killer by many foreign service officers, I have to say I’m pretty happy to see someone’s career not whither and die because she cared/cares about human rights.

If, as expected, Gregory Craig is named White House Counsel, Obama will have two State Department veterans in key positions.  For all the talk about the Capitol Hill veterans dominating, it’s worthwhile to note that no previous administration had put foreign policy experts in key positions outside the NSC apparatus.

You can find Sutphen’s bio (h/t Ambinder) below the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

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So we now have a Status of Forces Agreeement, and the Bush Administration already is arguing — as if anyone cares anymore — that the 2011 withdrawal date is nothing more than an aspirational timetable.  Here’s Dana Perino during yesterday’s press briefing (h/t Think Progress):

QUESTION: The President has said for months that he opposes any timetable and that any decision should be based on the conditions on the ground. How much is the latest agreement a departure, if not a repudiation?

PERINO: [W]hen you work with a partner on a negotiation, you have to concede some points. One of the points that we conceded was that we would establish these aspirational dates.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. . . Oh Dana, you’re such a joker.  Really, stop it.

Please.

Given the fact that events in Iraq are not exactly standing still, the Bush Administration’s continued delusional thinking does point to the need for the Obama team to start making clear its positions.  That, in turn, means they must already have started to think not just about who’s going into the top jobs, but also who will fill the key jobs related to Iraq:

• Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
• Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs
• Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs
• U.S. Ambassador to Iraq

Yes, it will matter who gets the top jobs at State and Defense (and yes, several of the State jobs may go to career foreign service officers), but I find it odd that nobody in the MSM media seems to be paying any attention to such questions.

Given the fact that Hillary get the top post at State and Robert Gates be asked to stay on at Defense, this is an especially pertinent question.  Last I checked, Gates still favors aggressively prosecuting the war and Hillary hasn’t ever apologized for her vote on the authorization resolution.

I mean if you’re going to put a pair of hawks in charge, it might be useful to make sure that someone like Ken Pollack doesn’t end up as A/S for NEA or U.S. Ambassador to Iraq.

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Everyone seems to have a laundry list of things the Obama Administration simply HAS to fix on their first day in office. Personally, I trust the new people to do many, many good things without my prodding.

So I have only one simple request. Can someone please, please kill the U.S. State Department’s official blog? I mean, I appreciate the effort. But the content has been so bland and so painfully disconnected from the major events of the day.

As Charlie Brown once wrote:

Almost none of Dipnote’s features are interesting or revealing (except in the sense that it shows the degree to which the Department can grind the originality out of anything). I’m guessing that the mandarins at State have put so many clearance filters on this thing, that almost nothing of any value can get through.

So please Mr. President, put this well-intentioned tool out of its misery. And if that isn’t possible, can we at least change the name? I mean really. Dipnote? Really?

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So there’s a new post up over at Dippynote, the State Department’s sometimes entertaining blog — or as I like to call it, the Bizarro Undiplomatic.

Today, Ambassador Gaddi Vasquez, the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Organizations in Rome, put up a post on his trip to Colombia, where he’s meeting with local entrepreneurs.  It’s a fine post and a worthwhile subject.

Then there’s the photograph that accompanies the story — one without a caption. So I think it’s time to help out our friends at Dippynote and provide one.

Yes, if your read the post, you can pretty much figure out what this is.  But where’s the fun in that?

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Twenty questions I would like to see asked at the debate tonight:

1.  Are we at war with Pakistan?  Senator Obama, given your pledge to go into Pakistan, if necessary, to take out Osama bin Laden, do you support President Bush’s current counter-insurgency efforts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?  And Senator McCain, when Senator Obama made those comments, you accused him of being reckless.  Do you now think President Bush is being reckless?

2.  Numerous reports have indicated that the State Department is woefully underfunded and understaffed.  Secretary Gates, among others, has urged Congress and the President to take steps to address these concerns.  Congress has largely been unsympathetic.  What would you do, as President to make the State Department more effective, and to give it the resources it needs to succeed?

3.  Do you support making USAID a cabinet-level agency?  Given the current financial crisis, can the United States afford to continue its foreign assistance programs?  Do you support reestablishing the US Information Agency or a similar construct to coordinate and strengthen our public diplomacy?

4.  Is the United States more or less safe and secure than it was on September 12, 2001?  Why or why not?

5.  Senator McCain, can you please tell me what the difference is between Russian incursions into Georgia and American incursions into Pakistan?  Don’t both involve a large power moving into territory controlled by a democratic ally of the United States?

6.  Some have argued that the American century is over and that China will soon be the world’s dominant economic and political power.  Do you think that is accurate?  Why or why not?  Would it matter if the United States wasn’t the biggest dog in the yard anymore?

7.  Senator McCain, five former Secretaries of State, including two who have endorsed you, have called for dialogue with Iran without preconditions.  You have stated your opposition, and your candidate for Vice President has suggested that such views are naive.  Yet when it came time for you to choose someone to brief Sarah Palin on foreign policy, you asked Henry Kissinger, one of those five, to do it.  Do you still believe that it is not possible for the United States not to talk to Iran?

8.  Senator Obama, are there any situations where you think it would be necessary to set conditions before meeting with a foreign leader?  In other words, is there anything that any leader can do that would make it impossible for you to meet with him or her?

9.  Senator McCain, your running mate has suggested that the United States should not second-guess Israel should it decide to attack Iran.  Is that your view as well?  Senator Obama, do you agree or disagree?

10.  Both of you have called on the Bush Administration to close Guantanamo and to end the practice of torture.  There is growing evidence that Bush Administration officials may have violated U.S. law as well as treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory.  Would you favor the investigation of such allegations and the prosecution of those, up to an including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, found to have broken American laws including statutes against war crimes?

11.  What can the United States do to strenghten the United Nations?

12.  Should the United States ratify the International Criminal Court treaty?

13.  What can the United States do to prevent genocide?  Would you favor military intervention by U.S. forces if it could help prevent a genocide?  Would you have intervened in Rwanda?  What are you going to do in Sudan?

14.  What is the one foreign policy issue that you think is currently under the radar but will have an impact on your administration?

15.  Most of the world has come to regard the United States as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.  What steps would you take to reverse that?

16.  Have we “lost” Latin America?  What steps would you take to reverse growing anti-Americanism in the region?

17. When this campaign started, no issue was bigger than Iraq.  Now it appears to be an almost forgotten issue.  Senator McCain, given Prime Minister Maliki’s outspoken desire to see American troops leave, why do you continue to oppose a phased withdrawal from Iraq?  Senator Obama, is there any situation where you can see American troops remaining in Iraq beyond the timetable you outlined?

18. Is the war in Afghanistan lost?  Would you favor a surge there along the lines of what happened in Iraq?

19.  Senator McCain, how can we afford to stay in Iraq and deal with the financial crisis at home?  Senator Obama, you have suggested moving troops in Iraq to deal with the growing crisis in Afghanistan.  Can we afford to do that as well?

20.  Given the fact that Russo-American relations have cooled considerably since Russia’s invasion of Georgia, what steps would you take to ensure continued Russian-American cooperation on anti-proliferation measures, including not only implementation of Nunn-Lugar, but also the situations in Iran and North Korea?

Add your own questions in the comments below.

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Two of my least favorite people in the world got together yesterday to have some laughs and share some good times.

No, I’m not talking about Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson.  In case you didn’t hear, Sarah Palin met with Henry Kissinger yesterday.  I wonder if Henry tried to pick her up?  “Vell Sarah, you are very pretty.  Have you ever done it with a war criminal?”

Ewwwwwww.

In any case, I happened to have an inside source at the U.S. mission to the U.N..  S/he was kind enough to make a list of all the questions the Sarahnator asked Hank the K:

1. What’s the difference is between a hockey mom and a Secretary of State?
2. Why can’t I see Afghanistan from my house?
3. Is a foreign minister kinda like a community organizer?
4. Do I have to read foreigners their rights before I talk to them?
5. Do I get to torture people personally the way Cheney does?
6. Are there foreigners I might mistake for moose?
7. Have you met John Bolton?  Is he as cute as everyone says he is?
8. Why does this Karzai guy wear those funny dresses?  Is he gay or something?
9. Why am I meeting with the President of Columbia University?  I never went to that college.
10. Why does the President of the United Nations go by the name Binky Moon?

Here’s the scary part.  Apparently a CNN sound tech picked up a small part of the conversation:

Kissinger: (something about a speech, not sure to whom he was referring) “And I’m going to give him a lot of credit for what he did in Georgia.”

Palin: “Good, good. And you’ll give me more insight on that, also, huh? Good.”

As I said yesterday, sometimes reality transcends satire.

Today, the fun continues.  Palin is meeting with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, new Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Word is that she spent at least two hours last night just learning how to say their names.

Photo illustration:  New York Magazine

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I’m pleased to announce that I am now a contributor to the Huffington Post.  You can find my first column, entitled “Ambassador for All War Crimes Except Our Own,” here.

Please digg it/buzz it up, and share it with friends!

And as always, thanks for reading.

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On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in New York City to interview some job candidates at my then-employer, Amnesty International USA.  As I walked from my hotel to the AIUSA office, I came upon  dozens of New Yorkers standing on the sidewalk outside a McDonald’s on the corner of 28th Street and 6th Avenue, staring at something going on downtown.

When I looked up, I saw that the North Tower of the World Trade Center was on fire.  Nobody around me knew what had happened.  I pulled out my cell phone and called a friend to tell her to turn on CNN.  As we were chatting, I started yelling into the phone — “Oh shit oh shit oh God oh no no no. . . .”  As I and all those around me watched in horror, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower.

Before the day was out, I saw first the South Tower and then the North Tower collapse.  I watched as a convoy of dozens of ambulances raced down 8th Avenue.  I stood in the door of a neighborhood delicatessen as hundreds of soot-covered residents trudged past.  I consoled friends and colleagues who lost loved ones in the collapse. I saw a city I loved turn into a silent ghostly shell of itself.

I also had spent much of the day desperately trying to reach friends in Washington to make sure they were okay.  When the attacks had just taken place, there were dozens of what later turned out to be false alarms.  CNN reported was that a car bomb had destroyed the northwestern corner of the State Department — which was where my office had been and where many of my friends still worked.

That night, as a result of a tip from a friend still in government, I managed to get on one of the few trains leaving New York for Washington.  Sitting across from me for the first two stops was a firefighter who had lost over half of the members of his company.  The trip took a lot longer than it normally did — we must have stopped at least a half-dozen times while engineers checked the tracks to make sure nothing was wrong.

That train felt like a refugee convoy – except these refugees wore suits, carried suitcases, and kept trying to use their non-functioning cell phones.  The trip turned into a discordant symphony of repeated “call failed” signals.

I returned home to a city under siege, with military police in armored personnel carriers patrolling the streets around the Union Station.  Although that worried me, my main emotion was relief that I made it home.  But when I got there, I couldn’t go to sleep.  Instead I stayed up almost all night, watching CNN replay the days’ events over and over and over again.

I am not a “survivor” of September 11.  My life was never at risk, and none of those I love died.  I have no right to speak on behalf of those who lost their lives or loved ones on that sad day.

For the next few months, that’s what I kept telling myself:  what happened to me wasn’t that bad.  But then I started to have trouble sleeping.  When I did manage to get to sleep, I dreamed of planes crashing into my apartment building.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but these were symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, PTSD is “an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened.”  Those suffering from PTSD often have flashbacks in which they believe the traumatic incident is happening again, as well as other symptoms.

That’s what happened to me.  That’s what the dreams were about: planes I could see coming but couldn’t stop.  I had no trouble getting on a plane or flying, but the sight of planes in the air freaked me out.  Living near the Potomac River, which is the approach path used by commercial airlines flying into Washington National, became a nightmare.  Planes come in low and fast, and often look as if they’re veering towards the city.  Every time I saw one, I would panic.  A couple of times, I had to pull off the road.

There were also other symptoms, ones that weren’t as obvious but which often manifested themselves in unexpected ways. I got angry a lot — irrationally and blindly angry — often for no reason.  I became moody.  I snapped at people –- no, I yelled at people.  Folks didn’t want to be around me.  I withdrew from the world.

The good news is that I got better.  Thanks to a wonderful therapist and caring friends (especially my future wife), I was able to understand what I was going through and start taking the necessary steps to get better.  After some bumps in the road, including one significant relapse triggered by a completely unrelated incident (also not uncommon among those with PTSD), I no longer have the dreams, get angry for no reason, or panic at the sight of planes over the Potomac.

What I wonder is whether my country — our country — also has gotten better.

There’s another moment that day that I still remember.  After I got off my cell phone that morning, when I and all those around me were still not sure what had happened, a woman next to me noticed the Amnesty pin on the lapel of my jacket.  She asked me if I worked for Amnesty and when I said yes, she said “Good luck.  You’re going to need it.  We’re all going to need it.”

I had no idea how right she was.

We have, over the past seven years, suffered from a collective form of PTSD, one from which we have yet to recover fully.  It manifests itself in many ways:  the fear of the other, the blanket hatred of Muslims and Arabs (and, for a brief period of deep insanity, even Sikhs), the irrational anger, the use of torture and other heretofore unspeakable acts.

Is it too soon to suggest that we need to move on?

We must find a way to continue mourning those who lost their lives but stop trying to revenge their deaths.  We must remember that we were wronged but stop using it as an excuse to inflict harm on innocents.  We must recognize that what happened that day, horrible though it was, cannot justify moral relativism or situational ethics.  We must accept that we do not honor the dead by undermining our values or abrogating our freedoms.

I believe that we as a nation can do these things.  I believe that we can get beyond the symptoms of our collective stress disorder and start living our lives again — without fear, without anger, and with acceptance.

But we’re not there yet.

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Yesterday, Condoleezza Rice delivered a keynote speech at the annual conference of something called the White House Initiative on National Historically Black Colleges and Universities.   Here’s what she had to say.

I have lamented that I can go into a meeting at the Department of State — and as a matter fact I can go into a whole day of meetings at the Department of State — and actually rarely see somebody who looks like me. And that is just not acceptable. . . . Because when I go around the world I want to see black Americans involved in the promotion and development of our foreign policy. I want to see a Foreign Service that looks as if black Americans are part of this great country.

She’s right.  Off the top of my head, I can think of three African-American foreign service officers I’ve dealt with over the years.  That’s ridiculous.

I could offer a long explanation of why diversity in the foreign service is important, but Life after Jerusalem already has done a better job than I could do:

As an American Indian, I am painfully aware that there are only 35 American Indians in all of the Department of State. So when Secretary Rice says she can go through a whole day and see few people who look like her, I get it. I see none. And I don’t believe, and I doubt she does, that the reason for this is that “white administrators refuse to hire them.” I do think there are plenty of qualified African Americans and American Indians out there who just don’t know that the State Department is an option. I certainly didn’t, and never even considered it until my partner joined.

What I think she is saying, and I agree, is that we need to make a conscious effort to reach out to other communities. No one is saying to hire blacks or Indians for their color. But maybe we could recruit a little better at traditionally black or Indian universities to let them know of the opportunities at State. Because the Foreign Service SHOULD look like America. The Foreign Service has been accused of being “pale, male and Yale.” We should send men and women of all hues, religions, sexual orientations, etc., abroad to represent us because that is what America is.

I would only add that by looking more like America, a more diverse foreign service also would look more like the world.  Many folks around the world have no idea that the United States is anything other than white and black.

To cite one example, one of the things that made Harold Hongju Koh such an effective Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor is that other governments had a very hard time suggesting to him that the United States was racist. The Chinese, in particular, just hated the fact that they had to go toe-to-toe with an Asian American.

Like LAJ, I’m not suggesting that we should appoint people just because they are a certain gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.  Harold was A/S because he was the single most effective human rights advocate ever to hold the job, not because he happened not to be white.  By celebrating all that is American, we also demonstrate to the world much that is great about America.

Hat tip:  Life after Jerusalem

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Here’s what the State Department’s most recent human rights report has to say about Libya:

The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is an authoritarian regime with a population of approximately six million, ruled by Colonel Mu’ammar al‑Qadhafi since 1969. . . .Qadhafi and his inner circle monopolized political power. . . . The government’s human rights record remained poor. Citizens did not have the right to change their government. Reported torture, arbitrary arrest, and incommunicado detention remained problems. The government restricted civil liberties and freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and association. The government did not fully protect the rights of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. Other problems included poor prison conditions; impunity for government officials; lengthy political detention; denial of fair public trial; infringement of privacy rights; restrictions of freedom of religion; corruption and lack of transparency; societal discrimination against women, ethnic minorities, and foreign workers; trafficking in persons; and restriction of labor rights.

Now here’s what our favorite government blog, Dippynote said after The Condi finished her Weekend at Moammar’s:

Libya’s journey to rejoin the community of nations came after a long process of reengagement. Its historic 2003 decisions to voluntarily rid itself of its WMD program and renounce terrorism created the foundation from which Libya has today become a leader in Africa and a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. . . .Today, Libya is a vital partner in the fight against terrorism, helping to stem the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq. It works closely with its neighbors to combat the growth of terrorism in the Sahara and Trans-Sahel regions.

Libya is also a leader on the African continent. It maintains a humanitarian corridor that provides much needed supplies to the people of Darfur. Working with the African Union Contact Group, it is helping to mediate the conflicts in Chad and Sudan. Additionally, Libya provides development assistance to other African countries. . . .

The U.S. and Libya have shared interests, but have also differed at times on some key policy points and use of diplomatic tools. Naturally, we would prefer to have their support on some of these issues, but it is noteworthy that Libya — which serves as a model to others — voted in favor of placing additional sanctions against Iran for its non-compliance with international efforts to ensure the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.  Libya has come a long way in its transformation from an isolated pariah to renewed membership in the international community.

One of these things is not like the other.

By the way, this is the sixth consecutive Dippynote post on Libya.  That’s more than the total number of posts on Iraq (five) since the beginning of April — and equal to the number of posts on Afghanistan (six) since Dipnote began.  And they wonder why nobody takes them seriously?

Here’s the best part:  it’s very likely that the two statements above were written by the same person — Amanda Johnson, a Libya Desk Officer in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA).  Ms. Johnson is identified as the author of the Dippynote piece, and since there was no diplomatic presence in Tripoli at the time of the last human rights report, it probably would have fallen to Ms. Johnson to prepare the first draft of that report.

This is what drives me bananas about the State Department. I have no beef with Ms. Johnson, who in all likelihood is a fine foreign service officer.  But given her age (she says in the Dipnote piece that she was born in 1977), she is in all likelihood a fairly junior one.  And junior foreign service officers — those without tenure — might as well be party apparatchiks for all the influence they have on the policymaking process:  they either toe the party line or find themselves out of a job.

In Ms. Johnson’s case, that means writing something highly critical of Condi’s creepy stalker boyfriend wannabe, and then, eight months later, being told to write something highly complementary.  It’s no wonder that foreign service officers get cynical about political appointees — and about the U.S. government’s commitment to human rights.

So which one is right?  Let me offer you the following hint:  the happier the tone, the bigger the lie.

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As I’ve noted before, I despise the Castro regime (both its Fidel and Raul editions).  I spent a year in the early 1990s documenting its use of psychiatric institutions to detain and torture human rights advocates and regime critics.  But I also oppose the U.S. embargo — I agree with the position held by many of the brave human rights and democracy activists on the island, who believe that it is one of the few things propping up the current regime.

So I have to say I was not surprised at the following report:

After days of pressure by certain Cuban exile leaders on the Bush Administration to temporarily lift travel and money remittance restrictions to Cuba to aid storm victims, the State Department has finally delivered a response.  The answer is no, the federal government will not lift restrictions that limit Cuban exiles to visiting close relatives in Cuba once every three years and sending up to $300 every three months.

In a statement issued Friday, the office of the State Department spokesman had this to say in direct response to the pleas for lifting restrictions: “We do not believe that at this time it is necessary to loosen the restrictions on remittances and travel to Cuba to accomplish the objective of aiding the hurricane victims.Non-governmental organizations on the ground in Cuba are already mobilizing to provide such assistance.”

The issue arose last week when three prominent members of the Cuban exile community, Ramon Saul Sanchez of the Democracy Movement and congressional Democratic Party candidates Raul Martinez and Joe Garcia called on President Bush to lift the restrictions. Then Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama endorsed the exile appeals. A bipartisan group of congressional leaders, four Republicans and three Democrats, issued a separate statement urging the U.S. government to send aid directly to storm victims. The Republicans included the two incumbents Martinez and Garcia are challenging: Lincoln and his brother Mario Diaz-Balart.

So let me get this straight.  The Cuban exile community supports the temporary lifting of the embargo to facilitate the delivery of relief to the victims of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, but the Bush Administration refused — in all likelihood because they’re trying to placate the Cuban exile community.

The ongoing stupidities of this Administration will never cease to amaze me.

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