It’s not his fault, but Richard Holbrooke died at an inopportune time.
On Tuesday, Obama is scheduled to meet with his top national security advisers to finalize an assessment of his Afghanistan strategy in the year since he announced the deployment of 30,000 additional troops and an expanded counterinsurgency effort last December.
The president, along with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has already made his views clear.
“We are in a better place now than we were a year ago,” Obama said late last month at a NATO summit. Progress, Clinton said, has been confirmed “by all accounts.”
He was one of our most accomplished diplomats. A look at his full career could serve as the starting point for a debate over the merits of American foreign policy from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was one of the authors of the Pentagon Papers. He served in Vietnam and he was part of the 1968 Paris Peace Talks delegation. He helped on the normalization of relations with China. During Clinton’s first term, he helped promote the eastward expansion of NATO. He was the leading force behind the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war in Bosnia. He brokered the deal with Jesse Helms to get America to pay its U.N. dues.
Here is a nice tribute to Holbrooke, written on Saturday by his good friend Steve Clemons while there was still a sliver of hope that he might survive.
link
And the message has finally begun to surface:
“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”
The Wash Post via the entire Internet.
That he said it to his PAKISTANI surgeon made my lol in the sense that it’s either laugh at the way life is, or cry and blow your brains out.
Just added a bit of ambiguity to the statement.
He was indeed a force. It’s said that when things were the worst that they could be, send in Richard. And they did.
It’s often said of him that he was an arrogant son of a gun. But it occurs to me as one looks at the list of his accomplishments, his creative & unwavering work at driving the point around the world of the value of the US, that he earned his arrogance.
His replacement? I would think the question is not who but how many. Of course I still am fond of Nancy Soderberg.
what has she been up to recently?
She has worked indpendently for some time with such gigs as bringing a studious Michael Bloomberg up to speed on foreign affairs. Here’s her website
He was a force of nature. More than once I’ve seen him slice and dice a reporter for asking the wrong kind of leading question. When he sat down with Rachel Maddow for a lengthy interview, I watched half expecting him to unload on her but he never did. They had a fascinating conversation. I was impressed by the depth her questions and his answers.
Andrea Mitchell on her show last night noted that he respected and enjoyed Rachel quite a bit and apparently they had an ongoing email relationship.
Steve Clemons is talking about Holbrooke on CSPAN right now.
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Helping to extend NATO eastwards is not a diplomatic accomplishment. The Russians have avowed that they will not permit any German forces on their immediate borders. If our aim is to antagonize the other major nuclear power in the world, then, we have succeeded in an unqualified way. Only an empire as vain and insensitive as the present United States can regard such a strategy, which really endangers world peace, as a meaningful addition to Holbrooke’s diplomatic career.