Officially, today marks “Armenian Remembrance Day,” set aside to honor the roughly 1.5 million Armenians killed at the hands of Ottoman Turks in 1915. But in the eyes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), it’s misnamed. From the statement just out of her office:
Today, we commemorate the 94th Anniversary
The Iranians have so far greeted every Obama administration overture to them with tepid-to-hostile reactions. Without reading too much into it — Mahmoud Ahmedinejad does not make the foreign policy of Iran; that’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, last seen rebuking President Obama — this would appear to More…
In my piece Wednesday about the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Iraq, I quoted a senior State Department official about diplomatic culture. He was reacting to a kind-of-obnoxious question I asked about the department being somewhat hidebound and embassy-centric, too reluctant and resistant to get out into the far-flung areas More…
I swear: this is the full and complete text of an email alert that the State Department just sent me.
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…
“Perception becomes reality so appearance is everything,” says Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), reminding everyone of the Clinton Foundation controversy. That wasn’t passive-aggressive at all, no.
Back to the campaign controversy of last year: should the United States negotiate with its adversaries without preconditions, as President-elect Barack Obama stated last year? More…
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke out Monday on Sen. Barack Obama’s diplomatic approach to hostile countries, during an exchange with Lukman Ahmed of BBC Arabic Television.
Rice stressed that the Bush administration’s tough stand on Iran was backed by multilateral agreements and prior U.N. resolutions, while sounding a positive More…
One can almost hear it. “Again? We picked the wrong guy again?”
Recent events involving Pakistan, Russia and Georgia suggest that Washington has again heaped its chips on a losing number. President George W. Bush, like so many before him, succumbed to the illusion that a little personal diplomacy — More…
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