An ax-wielding Somali man with suspected al-Qaida links was charged Saturday with two counts of attempted murder after breaking into the home of a Danish artist whose Prophet Muhammad cartoon outraged the Muslim world three years ago. The suspect, who was shot twice by a police officer responding to the scene, was rolled into a Danish court on a stretcher, his face covered. [AP]
Wow. Could it possibly have been these innocuous cartoons that he’s all upset about? People are willing to kill and die over these … cartoons?
This Washington Post article, in addition to being an interesting and entertaining read, confirms my immediate suspicions about that shipment of North Korean arms recently interdicted in the Persian Gulf:
Inspectors from the United Arab Emirates quickly swarmed the ship and uncovered a truck-size container packed with small arms made in North Korea. Concealed deeper in the ship was the real find: hundreds of crates containing military hardware and a grayish, foul-smelling powder, explosive components for thousands of short-range rockets.
The nature of the cargo, seized in July and described for the first time in interviews with officials and analysts in the UAE and Washington, has raised fears that Iran is ramping up efforts to arm itself and anti-Israel militias in the Middle East. Israeli officials have warned that they may use force to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The freighter seized in this port enclave was one of five vessels caught this year carrying large, secret caches of weapons apparently intended for the Lebanese group Hezbollah, the Palestinian organization Hamas or the Quds Force, a wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that supports insurgents in Iraq, according to U.S. and U.N. officials and intelligence analysts. In three cases, the contraband included North Korean- or Chinese-made components for rockets such as the 122mm Grad, which has a range of up to 25 miles and which Hamas and Hezbollah have fired into Israel.
Among the weapons components discovered aboard the ANL Australia were 2,030 detonators for 122mm rockets, as well as electric circuitry and a large quantity of solid-fuel propellant, according to an account given by UAE and U.N. Security Council officials. The materials were bought from North Korea and shipped halfway around the globe in sealed containers, labeled as oil-drilling supplies, that passed through a succession of freighters and ports. [Washington Post]
The supreme irony here may be that it was Christopher Hill who made it his single-minded mission to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for a list of predictably broken promises. To reward Hill for this stellar accomplishment, President Obama made him the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, a country where North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism may very well be killing Americans and Iraqis even today. Christopher Hill should have resigned a long time ago. If any further reason were needed, and as if his lackluster performance in Iraq were not enough, this is yet another reason to call for his head.
The Post goes on to tell us something about the volume of this arms trade and the lengths to which the Axis of Misunderstood Nations goes to conceal it:
The route chosen by North Korea to deliver the rocket components eventually seized by the UAE was hard to track. According to shipping records, the 10 large cargo containers left the North Korean port of Nampo on May 30 on a North Korean vessel, and two days later they were transferred to a Chinese ship in the port city of Dalian, in northern China.
From there, the containers were ferried to Shanghai, where on June 13 they were moved to a third ship, the ANL Australia, a Bahamian-flagged freighter owned by a French consortium. Spokesmen for the freighter’s owner and operator say they received sealed cargo containers along with manifests that listed the contents as oil-well equipment.
By mid-June, the cargo had left Shanghai on the ANL Australia, which followed a meandering course through East and Southeast Asia, pausing in mid-July in Dubai, one of the world’s largest seaports. Then it left on the final leg of its journey, to Shahid Rajai, on the shores of Iran’s Strait of Hormuz.
Speculate for yourself as to why the Chinese didn’t allow an inspection of the cargo in Shanghai. Though hardly conclusive proof by itself, in the context of plenty of other evidence, it’s more reason to suspect that China is trying to help North Korea evade the effect of international sanctions.
The Post’s article strongly suggests that North Korea continues to sponsor terrorism to this very day, probably knowingly. Clearly, President Bush erred when he removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism without securing any verifiable assurance that North Korea would end that sponsorship. It was, of course, the broken promise of denuclearization that induced Bush to commit that error, a promise that was obliterated with North Korea’s last nuclear test. Now, President Obama is compounding Bush’s error by not restoring North Korea even after the North makes its sponsorship more flagrant than ever, and even despite North Korea’s use of its official state media as an instrument of terrorism.
The report said there were “several indications that the DPRK (North Korea) is engaged in trade, transactions and activities proscribed by (U.N.) resolutions … and is seeking to mask these transactions in order to circumvent the Security Council measures.”
The six experts said there were several different techniques employed by the isolated communist state to conceal its involvement.
“These include falsification of manifests, fallacious labeling and description of cargo, the use of multiple layers of intermediaries, ’shell’ companies and financial institutions to hide the true originators and recipients,” the report said.
“In many cases overseas accounts maintained for or on behalf of the DPRK are likely being used for this purpose, making it difficult to trace such transactions, or to relate them to the precise cargo they are intended to cover.”
The experts said North Korea likely also used correspondent accounts in foreign banks, informal transfer mechanisms, cash couriers “and other well known techniques that can be used for money laundering or other surreptitious transactions.” [Reuters]
Separately, a new report by the Congressional Research Service informs us that Iran buys $2 billion — yes, with a “b” — in North Korean “military equipment” each year, including midget submarines.
Who supposes that this shadowy international proliferation racket only came into being after Agreed Framework II finally fell apart, or after North Korea was removed from the terror-sponsor list?
American insiders in Baghdad say the relationship between the top U.S. commander there, Gen. Raymond Odierno, and the top civilian official there, Amb. Christopher Hill, is deteriorating rapidly. Old hands say the chill between the two brings to the bad old days of Sanchez vs. Bremer, when those two unfortunates barely would speak to each other as the American position fell apart in early 2004, along with Iraq itself.
What I am hearing is that Odierno is profoundly frustrated with Hill, who despite knowing almost nothing about Iraq has decided after a short time there that it is time to stand back and stop influencing the behavior of Iraqi officials on a daily basis. In addition, I am told, the ambassador believes the war is an Iraqi problem, not something that really concerns Americans anymore, despite the presence of 125,000 American soldiers. [Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy Blog]
But hey, who is this Odierno guy, besides being Petraeus’s right hand in making The Surge work and doing what no one in Hill’s world thought could be done? Hill’s record, on the other hand, speaks for itself. Don’t miss the comment by Joel Wit.
The shipment of RPG’s and detonators to Iran being akin to shipping snow to South Dakota in February, I continue to be curious about the ultimate destination for those weapons. Like GI Korea, I think it makes sense that Iran might have been using North Korea as a plausibly deniable source for weapons it planned to give to Shiite militias in Iraq, or to al Qaeda. Iran, after all, is a major manufacturer of antitank missiles, including RPG’s, in its own right. It gives me cause to fear that Iran is planning some kind of Easter Offensive for Iraq. The more I think about this, the less sense it makes that this could have been anything but a willful effort by both Iran and North Korea to arm terrorists.
President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Discuss.
But the reason I’m posting this is simply to link to some commentary by Claudia Rosett and Don Kirk on the story.
Update:Here, on the other hand, is the kind of baseless conspiracy theory I don’t even like to see printed in an adult publication. I’m no fan of Vlad Putin to be sure and put very little past him, but I think it’s unbecoming of Time to go to print with a story based entirely on one guy’s speculation.
For the record, any POTUS who would pass up an opportunity to assassinate the terrorists who want to kill me, my family, and my fellow citizens in our own homes and offices should be impeached.
No wonder the New York Times is tanking. After all, don’t we already have one Village Voice?
Admittedly, I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand, I’ve noted signs that Obama’s North Korea policy is headed in the right direction — a far better one than Bush’s, if carried out in a sustained and comprehensive way — although I think Obama will probably do a Chris Hill and buy the same horse all over again the minute North Korea offers to sign Agreed Framework III. Still, my idea of “loyal opposition” extends an elected president and its fellow citizens the benefit of reasonable doubts and objective criticism, as opposed to binary zero-sum rancor.
I also recognize what Obama’s supporters on the left have learned — words are only that until they translate into action, and polls like this push Obama toward taking action:
A FOX News poll released Monday finds more than two-thirds of Americans say Obama has not been tough enough on North Korea (69 percent), while some 15 percent think his actions have been “about right” and 3 percent think he has been too tough.
Sizable majorities of Democrats (65 percent), Republicans (78 percent) and independents (61 percent) agree Obama should be tougher on North Korea. Among those voters who backed Obama in the 2008 presidential election, 59 percent say he has not been tough enough. [Fox News]
Let me just pause here to say what an odd position it is to be on the far-left fringe of public opinion. And if by “tough enough,” some suggest that direct military action is the solution, I’m not budging on that one. Still, give the people credit for recognizing the real danger:
People are most concerned North Korea will sell nukes to terrorists. Twice as many say their main concern is North Korea selling nuclear weapons (41 percent), as say attacking the United States (18 percent). For 1 in 10 the top concern is North Korea attacking a nearby country (10 percent) such as Japan or South Korea. Nearly a quarter of Americans (24 percent) says they are equally concerned about all of these possibilities.
The poll, taken before the recent protests in Iran, also showed that the people think Obama has been too soft on Ahmedinejad.
By the way, here’s more reason for caution about any optimism about Obama: the administration has decided that its robust enforcement of UNSCR 1874 goes no further than asking North Korean WMD ships to pretty please stop and give us a peek:
In discussing President Obama’s strategy on Monday, administration officials said that the United States would report any ship that refused inspection to the Security Council. While the Navy and American intelligence agencies continued to track the ship, the administration would mount a vigorous diplomatic effort to insist that the inspections be carried out by any country that allowed the vessel into port. [N.Y. Times]
Including Iran, Syria, and Burma, I presume (let alone China)? God help us all. The administration responds that North Korean ships don’t have the range to go long distances. I’m sure the North Koreans are welding new fuel compartments into their ships as we speak.
And now, we rejoin the mainstream with a screedy vengeance!
As President Barack Obama basks in the adoration of the media, the captivity of three of their colleagues — one in Iran and two in North Korea — now looks very much like a calculated test of whether terrorism will be restored to its former place as a tolerated method of diplomacy. The new administration’s reaction thus far has seemed paralyzed and unprepared for the test that Joe Biden, after all, foretold months ago. Behind the gauzy curtain of atmospherics, apologies, and sanguine rhetoric about outreached hands, the fists of the thugs who mean us harm remain firmly clenched when they are not grasping for new weapons to use against us. [Me, The New Ledger]
A few more interesting items on this. First, I’m happy to report that President Obama has at least expressed concern about Laura Ling and Euna Lee, even if I wish (a) the language had been stronger and (b) he’d have done it before I submitted the piece for publication. Oh well.
Also at the New Ledger, this very insightful piece by Ted Bromund on the opposed ideological forces within the new administration that could paralyze it.
According to my latest information, which is just short of a day old now, the nomination of Chris Hill was to go to the Senate floor yesterday, where it was expected to get more than enough votes to close debate. Under Senate rules, Senator Brownback now has his chance to go to the floor and speak, to see if he can change a few more minds. I’ve passed him as much ammunition as time has allowed. Now, the rest is up to the Senate. The odds heavily favor Hill’s confirmation today, but Brownback is prepared to go down fighting.
I often hear conservatives say that their party has run aground because it doesn’t know what it stands for. Christopher Hill typifies the rudderless, unprincipled, and failed Republocrat foreign policy that mislabels itself as “realism.” Brownback was the man who tried to stand in its way then, when Bush was in office, and he’s doing the same now that Obama is in office. Plenty in the press see fit to ridicule Brownback for being principled, because they happen to disagree with the principles themselves. History will continue to reveal that Brownback is right, and the rest of them are wrong.
I’m going to contact both of my liberal Democratic senators today, knowing full well that it’s unlikely to matter and that Hill — America’s most conspicuously unsuccessful diplomat — will probably be confirmed anyway. If this quixotic cause matters to you, I hope you’ll do the same. Here’s what I will be writing:
Dear Senator Mikulski, Please vote against the confirmation of Christopher Hill as Ambassador to Iraq until you have an opportunity to study Hill’s extensive record of disregard for the law, for dishonesty with Congress, and for professional incompetence in his dealings with North Korea that have made North Korea a greater danger to the United States. Some of Ambassador Hill’s efforts to mislead Congress about his diplomatic efforts to deal with North Korea are detailed at this article:
Among Ambassador Hill’s deceptions furthered his efforts to avoid raising the issue of North Korea’s horrific concentration camps with that country’s government, which you can learn more about here:
http://freekorea.us/camps/22
I am also gravely concerned that Hill’s nomination results from his personal friendship with Richard Holbrooke, rather than his record or qualifications. Ambasador Hill has no middle eastern experience and speaks no Arabic. His prior qualifications do not suggest that he is prepared for the political, military, or cultural challenges he will soon confront. Many other, better qualified candidates could do this job better than Christopher Hill. I urge you to study Ambassador Hill’s record of failure carefully before voting on his confirmation.
I agree that we need an Ambassador in Baghdad as soon as possible, but let’s choose the best qualified person for such an important job.
Why no post yesterday? In part, because I was pulling together all of my arguments against Christopher Hill’s confirmation for a long rant in The New Ledger. I know — it’s a quixotic crusade. Hill will probably be confirmed anyway, but now I can tell myself that I did what I could. The lack of information about Hill’s poor performance or lack of candor won’t be the reason Hill slides through. Permlink here.
[Update: The gods of the Senate calendar were not kind to Chris Hill today. Harry Reid and John Kerry tried to bully him into it, but Brownback stood his ground and did not lift his hold. Hill was not confirmed.
It may be a short-lived moral victory. After the recess, it will be in the hands of the Senate leadership to get the nomination to the full Senate floor. In any event, North Korea’s missile test will have happened by then, Hill’s nomination will be enmeshed in the broader discussion of how appeasement failed to tame North Korea, and even if Hill escapes to Baghdad eventually, his legacy will be in much greater peril.]
* * *
First, the good news: Senator Brownback has placed a hold on Chris Hill’s nomination. With the passage of the budget not yet done, that would have meant that the nomination would not have gone to the full Senate for a vote until at least after the Easter recess, which ends on April 18th, unless President Obama does a recess appointment.
Now, the bad news: the Senate did pass the budget yesterday, which means that Harry Reid may be able to schedule a cloture vote on the nomination today. If so, Hill would be confirmed by a large majority of senators, most of whom wouldn’t know better if you told them that Hill had earned a reputation for impeccable integrity as Ambassador to Jordan, and then Kuwait. If you really care about this, my suggestion is to call your Senator now.
Even if there is not vote today, the effort against Hill has not accumulated enough support to stop his nomination, and Republican opposition appears to be concentrating on another controversial nominee. If the Senate goes into recess without confirming Hill, the hold will have bought time for opponents to make their case. But unless opposition builds in the next two weeks — or unless Harry Reid fails to get a vote on the calendar — Hill will be confirmed, eventually. Even in such an event, we can hope that future generations of diplomats will take note of Hill’s example and feign some degree of honor, integrity, and respect for the law. But make no mistake — Hill’s confirmation could be as disastrous for the people of Iraq and America as it has been for the people of North Korea.
[A]s the current assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, [Christopher Hill] presided over negotiations with North Korea that deliberately minimized focus on the bleak human rights record of that country, ignored its nuclear proliferation, and had the practical effect of affirming its nuclear weapons capability. Hill also has a troubling hotdog tendency to play by his own rules, to the detriment of U.S. diplomacy…. Hill’s brand of cowboy diplomacy might be justified if it produced favorable results, but his record in dealing with North Korea is dismal. [Washington Times Editorial]
Let’s begin with the sideshow: Chris Hill’s formal confirmation hearings began yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a proceeding whose shallow questions bottomed out at pompous eyebrow-raising, but which more often resembled full-contact public analingus. I don’t know when I’ve ever seen ignorance clothed so pretentiously. Really, the degree to which the “august” senators on the Foreign Relations Committee have paid no attention to the conduct of policies they are charged with overseeing is depressing and stupefying, and yet it all somehow still makes for dreadfully dull viewing.
So naturally, I’m embedding the full two hours of video for you right here. I will confess that I did not listen to the entire thing, but I’d like to think that by now, some recently rendered Algerian jihadist in an underground cell in Albania is, and he’s about to break.
The subject of North Korea comes up at 32:46 (Sen. Lugar), 1:28 (Sen. Isakson), and 1:48 (Sen. De Mint). To a degree, the three of them asked questions about charges raised by Senator Brownback, who is not a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, but whose presence overshadowed the entire event. At one point, one of the senior senators let slip that it would not be easy to install Hill as ambassador to Iraq this year, and that’s because Senator Brownback has been the Senate’s sole effective oversight over our North Korea policy, its impeccable record of failure, and Christopher Hill’s single-minded mendacity in the pursuit of agreement, at the expense of our vital national interests and the very soul our nation.
From Obama’s nomination and the behavior of the Committee majority, it couldn’t be clearer: When the Democrats promise us “tough and smart” diplomacy, they mean Chris Hill’s kind. In practice, that means screwing up the entire world, one genocide at a time. Iraq should not be next, especially when recent events there show so much promise that we can leave a Iraq a far better place than we found it.
Senator Lugar helpfully invited Hill to answer Senator Brownback’s charge that Hill lied to him to get him to lift his hold on the nomination of Ambassador Stephens. I should note that when Brownback recently asked Hill the same question face-to-face, Hill insisted that he had invited Lefkowitz, who never showed up. Lefkowitz refuted that, and Brownback wrote to Lefkowitz yesterday asking him to respond for the record. But Hill, shamelessly unafraid of contradicting himself, changed his story yesterday. Hill now claims, retroactively, that he conditioned his promise to invite Lefkowitz to talks with the North Koreans, saying that he promised to do so only after the talks reached “Phase III,” that is, the phase after North Korea had verifiably disarmed. The transcript of the hearing reveals that Hill while initially tried to qualify his promise to Brownback, under Brownback’s direct and persistent questioning, he made an unequivocal, unqualified promise. The transcript not only proves that Hill is lying, but that Hill is lying about lying:
Senator Brownback: Ambassador Hill, there’s a Special Envoy for Human Rights in North Korea, which I don’t believe has been invited
to any of the negotiations to date between the United States and the Six-Party Talks.
Ambassador Hill: Well, we have been—first of all, he would be most welcome if he wishes to attend. He has been—
Senator Brownback: I want to, because my time will be narrow here: Will you state that the Special Envoy will be invited to all future negotiating sessions with North Korea?
Ambassador Hill: I would be happy to invite him to all future negotiating sessions with North Korea.
I’m still not done. Hill’s claim could only be true if Hill honestly believed that Phase III would be reached before Lefkowitz left town with President Bush’s baggage train, and in fact, Hill said with a straight face that he expected exactly that. This does not even pass the laugh test. Hill could not possibly have believed this, but he certainly knew it to be false when the North Koreans repeatedly and publicly balked at inspection and verification in September and October of 2008. And yet, as Senator Isakson wondered, Hill did not go back to Brownback to explain this completely unexpected development.
One more: Senator De Mint asked Hill about Hill’s previous statement that we should not continue to negotiate with North Korea while it continues to proliferate. So why did Hill continue to negotiate with the North Koreans after we caught them building a nuclear reactor for Syria? Because, Hill now tells us, all of our intelligence suggests that North Korea had stopped proliferating after that. And also, the North Koreans said so. But multiplepublishedreports suggest that North Korea continues to proliferate WMD technology in violation of U.N. Resolutions 1695 and 1718, and are earning a significant percentage of their national income by doing it.
* * *
The hearing may have had some moments of unintended insight, but Sam Brownback towered above it in stature and relevance. Yesterday afternoon, Brownback addressed a mostly empty Senate gallery, but his words resonated among all of the great and small bookmakers of Hill’s odds of confirmation.
As the Weekly Standard notes today, Hill’s chances of confirmation are slim unless Brownback decides not to hold Hill’s nomination:
Harry Reid will have to shut down the Senate in order to get Hill confirmed, and with everything yet to be done before the recess, that seems unlikely. Chris Hill may not make it to Baghdad anytime soon, if ever — which is almost certainly for the best. [Weekly Standard Blog]
Some full disclosure: I’m proud to say that I supplied Senator Brownback’s office with the concentration camp photographs and assisted with research and suggestions for the speech — mainly quotations by Hill and others, and cites to sources — some of which appear to have made it into the final text.
The full text of Brownback’s must-read speech follows after the page break.
Updates:
The Congressional Quarterly explains the likely effect of Brownback’s hold — should he officially pull the trigger — and gives us the back story on the intense pressure that Brownback withstood before giving his speech on Wednesday:
Though Hill’s supporters appear to have enough votes to overcome Brownback’s objections and confirm the nomination, the Senate does not appear to have time for the procedural maneuvers that would be necessary to do so before the two-week spring recess begins on April 3. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is likely to approve Hill’s nomination March 31, but next week’s Senate schedule is likely to be dominated by consideration of the fiscal 2010 budget resolution.
A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he could not comment on when the Senate would take up the nomination until the committee approved it.
Human Rights Concerns Brownback’s speech indicated that both carrots and sticks from his colleagues had failed to persuade him to allow the nomination to proceed.
At Hill’s confirmation hearing Wednesday, Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., and ranking Republican Richard G. Lugar of Indiana strongly warned against delay.
“We are at war,” Lugar said. “This is not a parliamentary struggle among senators who have a diverse point of view.”
Lugar met with Brownback, who is not on the Foreign Relations panel, on March 24. At the hearing, Lugar read off an extensive list of Brownback’s complaints, including that Hill had broken a promise to invite the U.S. special envoy for human rights into the negotiations, and then gave the nominee a chance to rebut the accusations. [Congressional Quarterly]
In fact, Sen. Brownback has not yet clearly said that he’s going to hold the nomination, and barring something unexpected, that’s probably the only way to stop Hill from being confirmed. Most Republicans are too uninformed or mealy-mouthed to take a firm position, but even the Washington Independent concedes that Hill’s explanation of his promise to Brownback doesn’t fit with what Hill said last July:
In the 2008 hearing, though, Hill did specify that there were separate phases to the North Korean negotiating process. But he did not indicate clearly that that he would include Lefkowitz only during the normalization phase. Instead, he said, “I would be happy to invite him to all future negotiating sessions with North Korea.”
Though Hill did not acknowledge the discrepancy, at Wednesday’s hearing he expressed regret over not clarifying his position as the negotiations advanced. “In retrospect, Senator,” Hill told Wicker, “when I realized we weren’t going to get to Phase Three, I should have gone back to Sen. Brownback.” [The Washington Independent]
Yes, and in the interest of getting an ambassador confirmed quickly, I call on Senator Lugar to call on President Obama to nominate someone with some regional experience, and who isn’t a pathological liar. Is this too much to ask?
Update 2: Writing at the Weekly Standard blog, Stephen Hayes thinks he’s found another lie in Hill’s testimony.
The Washington Times, reporting that Senator Brownback is increasingly open in his threat to hold Chris Hill’s nomination as Ambassador to Iraq, relates just the latest story of Hill misleading a member of Congress:
In [a] hearing on July 31, in response to a request to bring Jay Lefkowitz, who was a special envoy for North Korea human rights, to future talks, Mr. Hill said, “I would be happy to invite him to all future negotiating sessions with North Korea.”
When contacted Thursday, Mr. Lefkowitz said he was not invited to any talks with North Korea after Mr. Hill’s promise.
“I can certainly understand why Senator Brownback is upset because, in point of fact, even after Ambassador Hill’s commitment to the senator last summer, human rights never found its way into the six-party talks,” Mr. Lefkowitz said.
Mr. Brownback told The Times that Mr. Hill “did mislead me in open testimony before the Armed Services Committee.” [Washington Times]
The Weekly Standard blog has more of the latest on how Brownback is standing firm, and surveying some of the embarrassing arguments in Hill’s defense. One argument that no one should make is that Brownback is doing this for partisan reasons. It wasn’t a Democrat who nominated Kathleen Stephens, after all.
The administration is drawing serving military officers into politics by asking them to publicly support Hill’s confirmation, and from the perspective of generals Petraeus and Odierno, this must be a very easy choice to make. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing what their commander in chief asks. Whether Hill becomes ambassador or not, they don’t want Holbrooke holding a grudge against them (assuming he survives that whole AIG thing). They may also need some points in the bank with this administration if they want to stretch out a withdrawal timeline or plead for an extra brigade if the security situation hits a rough patch. On the other hand, Petraeus and Odierno know that they have the support of McCain, Graham, and most congressional Republicans no matter what. As they should, for the best of reasons.
A much less convincing argument the administration is making is that we can’t afford to leave the post of ambassador vacant at this critical time. But who ever asked them to leave it vacant? Obama could make this same dumb argument if he’d nominated Carrot Top for the job, and frankly, it’s a statistical fact that this is the least critical time for Iraq since the invasion, thanks to the mostly unheralded brilliance of our counterinsurgency campaign there. In that light, it would seem more important to choose well than to choose quickly. Surely there are dozens of better qualified candidates within arm’s reach of Holbrooke or Clinton with more experience with the region, counterinsurgency, or even minimally effective diplomacy. Hill’s atrocious performance in dealing with North Korea and his increasingly obvious character shortcomings show us just how quickly and easily the President could do far better than picking a congenital liar to lead our most important diplomatic mission.
For new readers measuring the length of Hill’s nose, start here.
Read the full text of the letter here. The senators signing include Brownback (R-KS), Ensign (R-NV), Inhofe (R-OK), Bond (R-MO), and Kyl (R-AZ), the Senate Republican whip. McCain and Graham are still opposed to Hill’s nomination but did not sign. No one on the Foreign Relations Committee signed or came out in opposition.
The big question now: will any Senator hold the nomination? Not yet. A hold would shift the focus to the Senator instead of Hill. Those opposed to Hill would be wise to let the public discussion focus on Hill’s qualifications, his fitness for the position, and especially his performance record for as long as possible.
There are now four senators — Brownback of Kansas, McCain of Arizona, Graham of South Carolina, and Ensign of Nevada — who have declared their opposition to Chris Hill becoming the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Recall from the experience of Kathleen Stephens, now our Ambassador to South Korea, that it takes just one senator to hold an ambassador’s nomination. Hill’s nomination will not go forward unless those senators all lift their holds.
[Oops: I shouldn’t assume that the senators opposing Hill’s nomination are placing holds on it. I don’t actually know that to be the case.]
Why? To understand, start by watching Senator Brownback’s speech announcing the nomination hold on Stephens if you haven’t already done so. It’s also worth looking at the horrors on which Senator Brownback wanted to shine the light of day and focus America’s influence.
Ironically, Sen. Brownback lifted his hold on the nomination of Ambassador Stephens, a Hill protege, after Hill gave Brownback assurances about keeping human rights in his negotiating agenda. Hill made those assurances in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services, a committee on which Brownback doesn’t even hold a seat, but on which he was allowed to sit for a day in the hope that he’d lift his hold on the Stephens nomination. Brownback now feels Hill reneged on the commitments he made in that hearing, including this one: ““I would be happy to invite [North Korea special envoy Jay Lefkowitz] to all future negotiating sessions with North Korea.”
As readers of this site already know, misleading Congress and the public is par for Hill’s course. So while it’s certainly appropriate to focus, as others have, on Hill’s lack experience with the Middle East or Iraq, my own concerns are founded in Hill’s lack of candor and his demonstrated failure to deal effectively with terrorism. Hill’s M.O. has been a willingness to say anything — true or not — to let North Korea off the hook for its behavior and save a diplomatic initiative that’s been far better for Chris Hill’s career than for the interests of the United States. Consider:
- Hill’s denial that he had received Esther Kim’s plea for help learning of her husband’s fate, until this blog published photographs of him actually receiving that letter directly from the hand of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.
- To save his failed diplomatic deal from revelations of North Korean cheating, Hill and the rest of the Bush Administration withheld key details from Congress about North Korea’s proliferation to Syria for months.
- For the same reason, Hill almost certainly withheld North Korea’s insistence that it would never give up its nuclear weapons, an insistence that successfully Hill kept from Congress and the public until former U.S. diplomat Jack Pritchard revealed it. The North Koreans later declared the same intentions directly to former Secretary of State Rice and in numerous public statements.
Hill also reneged on numerous assurances he gave to Congress when he first went to Congress to sell Agreed Framework 2.0 in a February 28, 2007 hearing:
- On verification, to Rep. Gary Ackerman: “Clearly we have to be able to verify this, and I can assure you what we will not end up with is an agreement where they pretend to disarm and we pretend to believe them. We will have an agreement where we know.” What really happened.
- On human rights and food aid, to Rep. Chris Smith: “I can assure you that any agreement … will be done entirely consistent with our laws and obligations [to condition non-humanitarian aid on human rights improvements, and to distribute aid according to internationally accepted humanitarian standards]. I can promise you that, Mr. Congressman…. As I have made crystal clear in all my discussions with the North Koreans, the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea can never have a fully normal relationship absent progress on these important fronts.” A year later, in an interview with the L.A. Times: “Obviously we have continued differences with [North Korea], but we can do that in the context of two states that have diplomatic relations.” Human rights conditions in North Korea haven’t improved, except perhaps inadvertently, yet Hill engineered the delivery of a million tons of heavy fuel oil to the regime. U.S. efforts to monitor the distribution of food aid were similarly ineffective, and were similarly sidelined from Hill’s agenda.
- On North Korea’s uranium program, in his opening statement, Hill insisted that North Korea must disclose “all” of its nuclear programs, and specified that “[a]ll means all, and this means the highly enriched uranium program as well.” Despite a growing body of evidence that North Korea had a uranium enrichment program, and despite North Korea’s ongoing refusal to disclose it, Hill pushed to give North Korea the million tons of heavy fuel oil and remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors.
- On North Korea’s counterfeiting of U.S. currency, to Rep. Ed Royce of California: “I want to assure you that I have repeatedly raised with the North Korean side that it is completely unacceptable to be engaged in this type of activity…. We have no intention of trading nuclear deals for counterfeiting our currency.” But even as he said those words, Hill was probably already engineering the return of $25 million in counterfeiting-tainted funds to North Korea and the lifting of all U.S. sanctions relating to counterfeiting and money laundering. Had you or I done the same, we’d have been prosecuted for money laundering. The entire counterfeiting issue subsequently vanished from Hill’s negotiating agenda.
The result? North Korea didn’t disclose its nuclear programs, didn’t agree to let us verify its disarmament, didn’t hand over any nuclear material, didn’t dismantle or hand over any nuclear weapons, didn’t stop counterfeiting our currency, didn’t stop starving its people, didn’t reform its economy, didn’t stop threatening its neighbors, didn’t account for any of the scores of citizens of other nations it kidnapped, and didn’t shut down its concentration camps. In exchange, it got a million tons of fuel oil, enough food aid to feed its elite for another year, the easing of U.S. sanctions, the suspension of U.N. sanctions, and eligibility for international loans.
Hill got away with all this because Congress paid little attention to North Korea. That won’t be the case with Iraq. The latest voice in opposition is to Hill’s nomination former Vice President Dick Cheney:
President Barack Obama’s pick as the nation’s top diplomat to Iraq was “a choice I wouldn’t have made,” former Vice President Cheney said.
“He is not the man I would have picked for that post,” Cheney said of Christopher Hill. “He has none of the skills and talents that Ryan Crocker has.”
Hill’s appointment ran into Republican resistance for what they describe as his lack of experience in the Middle East and his eagerness to strike a deal in inconclusive disarmament talks with North Korea. [The Politico]
Cheney was never a fan of Hill or his style of diplomacy, but still, it’s odd to see senior members of the Bush Administration already denouncing the man put in charge of one of its key diplomatic initiatives. The converse is also true: according to a rumor circulating in town, Hill gave a series of interviews to New York Times journalist David Sanger in which Hill dissed his former superiors. I don’t know which ones, but I’d say Cheney was the most likely of them. Cheney admittedly doesn’t move a lot of public opinion these days, but he probably knows a few things about Hill’s Korean machinations that I hope he’ll reveal as Hill’s nomination goes off the rails.
The four senators currently opposing Hill are all Republicans, but keep an eye on Lieberman.
