richard lugar

Contrary to the calls for President Obama to explictly support the Iranian opposition that Weigel reported on today, here are two Republican voices calling for a more muted American response to the upheaval. First is Nicholas Burns, the Bush administration’s undersecretary of state for political affairs, who last week chastised conservatives for downplaying the potential [...]

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee just now voted out Harold Koh’s nomination to become State Department legal adviser to the full Senate. The vote was twelve in favor and five opposed, with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking Republican, being the only GOPer voting for Koh.
If Koh had his “transnationalist” druthers, of course, the only [...]

One thing that you didn’t get from Ambassador Richard Holbrooke in yesterday’s hearing on Pakistan: a sense of precisely what accountability measures the Obama administration finds too “inflexible” in the House’s Pakistan funding bill. Nor did he say what the administration’s metrics — I’m told the word “benchmarks” are too reminiscent of the Iraq debate [...]

My understanding is that around 2:00 or 2:30 p.m. today, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) are going to introduce their bill providing aid to the civilian components of the Pakistani government. Recall that last week, Undersecretary of Defense Michele Flournoy said the bill’s House counterpart is “too inflexible” in terms of providing [...]

So when the Obama administration announced on Friday that it was going to come up with benchmarks to judge the success or failure of its Af-Pak strategy but was still working out what they would be, Denis McDonough, a top White House foreign-policy adviser, said that the forthcoming Kerry-Lugar bill would have some “good metrics [...]

Speaking of benchmarks for measuring the success or failure of the Obama administration’s Af-Pak strategy, we, uh, don’t have them yet. Bruce Riedel, chairman of the review committee that came up with the strategy, explained to reporters on Friday:

In this corner: Christopher Hill, the Obama administration’s choice to become ambassador to Iraq; Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the committee’s ranking GOPer; Defense Secretary Bob Gates; Generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno; and former ambassadors to Iraq John Negroponte, Zalmay Khalilzad and Ryan Crocker.
In [...]

As I reported earlier, and in my piece that just went up now, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is backing Chris Hill as the next ambassador to Iraq. Here’s Lugar’s just-released full statement:
“As President Bush’s envoy to the Six Party Talks, Assistant Secretary Chris Hill demonstrated extraordinary [...]

A few days ago Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) announced their opposition to Ambassador Chris Hill, President Obama’s choice to become the next ambassador to Iraq. They’ve been joined in their opposition by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) and, uh, former Vice President Dick Cheney. But so far they haven’t gotten any public [...]

Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) returns to the “perception” problem with respect to the Clinton Foundation, raising the need for the foundation to “forswear new foreign donations” when Clinton is secretary of state. “This was bound to be a dilemma from the moment that the President-elect asked you to be secretary of state,” Lugar points out, [...]