ryan crocker

Laura Rozen, newly minted Politico hire, posts the integrated civilian-military campaign plan for Afghanistan from Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And if you turn to an appendix, you can find an elusive, chimerical beast: metrics for measuring progress. Well, sort of. They may not be the National Security Council’s metrics, but the document [...]

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 [...]

Bad news for those who don’t want Chris Hill to become the next ambassador to Iraq:
Also in Mr. Hill’s corner are three former Iraq ambassadors: Ryan C. Crocker, Zalmay Khalilzad and John D. Negroponte. The three wrote a letter supporting Mr. Hill for the post and urging the Senate to approve his nomination.

The veteran diplomat’s tenure as North Korea troubleshooter in the Bush administration is key to understanding the current pushback.

Nancy Youssef at McClatchy reports that the top U.S. civilian and military officials in Iraq, Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. Ray Odierno, have given the White House their assessments of U.S. troop withdrawals that would take 16, 19 and 23 months. Odierno’s predecessor as commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, who now [...]

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 didn’t happen, and now the [...]