Opposition to Christopher Hill’s Iraq Ambassador Nomination Grows

Somewhere, Anthony Zinni must be smiling.

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 November 2007 fib about North Korea’s nuclear declaration.

– 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.

More here, at the Mudville Gazette.