I noted yesterday that Chris Hill doesn’t have a confirmation hearing scheduled in the Senate for his new post as ambassador to Iraq. Now it looks like the hearing’s just around the corner. The White House put out a press release today announcing Hill’s formal nomination to the Baghdad More…
It’s been about two weeks since President Obama officially announced that Chris Hill was his choice to become the next ambassador to Iraq. He’ll have a big job, as Obama told the Marines at Camp Lejeune during his speech on ending the Iraq war:
In 2003, then Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division that had participated in the invasion of Iraq, had a running joke with an embedded reporter, Rick Atkinson. Slyly acknowledging the unclear aims of the inchoate occupation of Iraq, the general would turn to the reporter and More…
This took pretty much forever. Rumor has it — and it’s pure rumor, but blog-worthy rumor — that there was friction over making former Clinton administration peace-processor Dennis Ross essentially an envoy to Iran under a different name. (His official title: Special Advisor to the Secretary of State More…
While much of the national security establishment’s attention is understandably focused on how the Obama administration handles Afghanistan — both the increase in troop levels and the forthcoming strategy review — there are some interesting Iraq-related changes underway as well.
As kind of a coda to the non-ambassador-to-Iraq-Tony-Zinni episode, I speculated at first about the optics of placing two generals — Zinni and Karl Eikenberry — in the all-important ambassadorships of Iraq and Afghanistan. Laura Rozen got at that in her Zinni post as well, and now More…
The Anbar Awakening — the collection of tribes in Iraq’s Anbar Province that in 2006 broke with Al Qaeda and embraced a partnership with U.S. forces — had extremely high expectations for capturing the province’s government from the entrenched Iraqi Islamic Party in Saturday’s election. But it looks like that More…
That story Barbara Slavin broke about retired Marine Gen. Tony Zinni being promised the next ambassadorship to Iraq only to have the offer abruptly rescinded? Foreign Policy’s Laura Rozen got Zinni on the phone and he absolutely unloaded.
Zinni told Rozen: President Obama spoke to Zinni personally; Secretary More…
Barbara Slavin at The Washington Times has an interesting coda to the not-yet-official-but-very-likely appointment of Chris Hill to be ambassador to Iraq. Apparently, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former Central Command chief and Iraq war opponent who quietly advised President Obama during the campaign, thought he was More…
It appears that Iran succeeded in launching a satellite into space as part of an effort to expand its ballistic-missile capability into the thousands-of-miles-away range. Noah Shachtman at Danger Room points out that the Iranians have a history of misrepresenting their military technology, but nevertheless, it’s a worry. I More…
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