Colin Powell
It was well past the official close of business at NATO headquarters in Brussels on September 11, 2001, but the chamber of the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s political decision-making body, was anything but dark and quiet.
Hours after the terrorist attacks in New York and suburban Washington, Secretary-General George Robertson had gathered the ambassadors from all 19 member states to discuss how the events that were still unfolding live on television affected the organization and what NATO might do in the immediate aftermath.
“After the meeting, the Canadian ambassador, David Wright, took me aside to ask if Article 5 should be considered,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador, recalled last week, referring to a clause in the 1949 Washington Treaty that created the alliance that says an attack on one member is an attack on all…
George Herbert Walker III, a Missouri businessman who headed a financial-services company for 14 years, wanted to serve his country overseas. So in early 2002, he turned for advice to his first cousin, George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father.
“He thought it would be a good idea,” Mr. Walker recalled recently. “He didn’t want to tell his son what to do, but told me to write the president a letter. I didn’t name a country, but there are many countries we have a fragile relationship with.”
Today, Mr. Walker, who is in his early 70s, is the ambassador to Hungary — a NATO ally and supporter of Bush administration policies with several hundred troops in Iraq. Like many political appointees, he was immediately struck upon taking up his posting in October with the stark contrast between modern diplomacy and the lingering image of the Foreign Service as a collection of stuffy white males in striped pants…
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Colin Powell listened with growing but controlled anger. He saw the question coming. After all, there is no charge against a secretary of state more serious than the one leveled by some members of his own Republican Party — and even in the administration he serves.
They accuse him of leading a government agency that not only opposes President Bush’s foreign policy, but also tries to undermine it. His response came out in a single well-known barnyard expletive. Then, to emphasize the point, he added: “That’s quotable.”
“I can show you people in Washington who claim to be pushing the president’s agenda, [but] who are not,” Mr. Powell continued, sitting in his small inner office on the seventh floor of the State Department…
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Vojislav Kostunica is still trying to recover from the “shock” he felt nearly four months ago when he finally realised that he was indeed the president of Yugoslavia. He was “thrilled and humbled”, he says, and had thought much about how he would “behave as president-elect” after his September 24 victory over Slobodan Milosevic, who disputed the results of the vote until he was forced out of power on October 6.
But since then, “things have been changing very quickly” for the soft-spoken and studious 56-year-old lawyer, who readily acknowledges his “lack of experience” in governing, and finds his new duties and unlikely celebrity rather overwhelming.
“This job is very difficult, but also very creative,” he says, “and I wouldn’t be in politics if the creativity were missing”. Although he remains entirely serious, it seems that he is wittily hinting at the total mess which he inherited in his country’s affairs — both domestic and foreign — from his predecessor and which necessarily will require quite a bit of “creativity” to overcome…
Richard Holbrooke is about to make yet another exit from the US foreign policy stage — the fourth in his 38-year career. Many of the people who know him well, though, are already predicting a stormy comeback.
This is the second time he has come within a whisker of the job that many in Washington say he’s been pursuing for years: secretary of state. In 1996, a year after he brokered the Dayton agreements that ended the war in Bosnia, he lost out to Madeleine Albright — the first woman to hold the top diplomatic post.
This time it was the slimmest of election wins by Republican George W. Bush that decided Holbrooke’s fate. Although the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, was careful during the campaign not to reveal his potential cabinet choices, foreign policy insiders were betting that Holbrooke, at present US ambassador to the United Nations, would most likely have been his choice to succeed Albright…
Continue reading about So busy at diplomacy, he ‘ignored’ the US election
