A pushback from the military and a skeptical secretary of defense have dashed the hopes of some Obama administration officials for closer cooperation with a global war-crimes tribunal that some fear could prosecute American service members, current and former U.S. officials say.
Although the United States has rejoined the meetings of the International Criminal Court (ICC) member states after an eight-year absence, it has taken little new action to work more closely with the court.
In fact, many international legal analysts argue that there was a more significant change in U.S. policy toward the ICC from the first to the second term of President George W. Bush than there has been since President Obama took office last year…
At first glance, David T. Donahue’s experience on September 11, 2001, was not much different from that of most other Americans. “I heard the first plane had already hit the World Trade Center, and then watched the second live on television, like everybody else,” he recalled recently.
But while most Americans were at home or at work when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mr. Donahue was in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where the plot that killed about 3,000 Americans most likely was hatched.
He had been dealing for days with the country’s Taliban regime, which had provided safe haven to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network since 1996…
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…
Continue reading about Diplomats fight stuffed-white-shirt image
Condoleezza Rice has rarely heard a question she doesn’t know how to answer, from queries about her tumultuous childhood in segregated Alabama to her success in the male world of superpower politics, nuclear weapons and arms control.
She meets me with the friendly smile and easy hospitality of a west-coaster, defying the image of someone anointed by Washington insiders to become the most powerful woman in the world in a year. The chief foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, Rice is being tipped as a likely secretary of state or national security adviser should Bush win the White House.
As huge a task as this sounds, Rice’s own life story has the word “amazing” written all over it. At 45, she has been the first black woman in just about any job she’s taken on: from special assistant for national security affairs to President George Bush when she was only 34, to provost of California’s prestigious Stanford University (the Harvard of the west coast) where she managed a budget of nearly $2bn…
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General Wesley Clark led NATO’s forces to victory in the alliance’s first combat in history — the 1999 air campaign against Serbia over Kosovo — but back home in the US he was treated like a defeated warrior and dismissed from his post of supreme allied commander in Europe.
He paid a price for bitterly clashing with the Pentagon over its unwillingness to consider sending ground troops against Serb forces. But, more significantly, Clark had opposed the entire post-cold war philosophy of the US military, which was reluctant to get involved in foreign conflicts and, if it did, it took a long-distance, low-risk approach.
Indeed, the Kosovo war was conducted from altitudes of 15,000ft and without the loss of a single NATO soldier. While Clark was proud of the victory, he saw and publicly exposed a huge gap between the pretended “combat readiness” of the most powerful military in the world and its refusal to accept the realities of war…
Continue reading about Fighting talk from a reluctant civilian
