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Toby Harnden tells us what Colin Powell is up to these days, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK. This post does a number on the president and Powell
Sitting in the Oval Office beside the first black President of the United States on Wednesday was the man who, 15 years ago, many thought would achieve that distinction.
“He is not only a great statesman, and a great public servant, but also very funny and a great counsellor,” said President Barack Obama, speaking with a warmth he normally reserves for descriptions of his own qualities.
…Powell was in the Oval Office to urge Republicans to ratify the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which Obama is seeking to push through the Senate before Christmas.
The capacity of Powell to persuade Republicans has been severely limited since he endorsed Obama for president in 2008 even though John McCain, the Republican nominee, was a long-time friend. …
Also in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, Nile Gardiner comments on the embattled Secretary of State.
Could Hillary Clinton become the highest profile casualty of the Wikileaks scandal? In Bahrain last Friday, a tired looking Secretary of State declared she would definitely not be running for president in 2012 (no real surprise there), but far more significantly stated that her current role would be “my last public position”. She signaled that she would “probably go back to advocacy work, particularly on women and children and probably around the world.” This was a big step back for a hugely ambitious politician with potentially another two decades of public life ahead.
The timing of her statement was highly significant, coming just days after Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of confidential State Department cables with the aid of several newspapers across the world, including The New York Times. Mrs. Clinton has been given the unenviable task of trying to repair the huge damage which the leaks have inflicted upon the trust America’s allies traditionally place in Washington. She has already been directly in touch with dozens of world leaders in an effort to soften the blow to America’s standing.
Whereas a British foreign secretary in similar circumstances would probably be forced to resign over such a large diplomatic debacle, it is unlikely that Clinton will stand down over the issue. After all, the initial leak occurred at the Pentagon, not the State Department, and was the result of an extraordinary security breach. Although there have been some calls for Clinton’s resignation from critics on the Left, (who are unhappy at claims that she ordered US diplomats to spy on the United Nations), she has at the same time received backing from unexpected quarters on the Right. …
Nile Gardiner is on a roll. He packed a lot into this next WikiLeaks post.
The White House strategy so far has been to largely ignore WikiLeaks, and let Hillary Clinton and the State Department handle the fall-out from the debacle. The president hasn’t even commented publicly on the release of over a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables, despite the immense damage the leak is doing to American diplomacy and US strategic interests on the world stage. He is giving all the appearance of a commander-in-chief who is not in control, with an inept administration that seems to blunder from one crisis to another, at times with no-one at the helm.
That’s surely going to have to change, with WikiLeaks now dramatically upping the stakes with the release of some extremely sensitive documents which will be exploited by terrorist groups across the world, including al-Qaeda. As The Times has just reported:
WikiLeaks raised the stakes tonight in its battle with the United States with the release of a secret list of vaccine suppliers, mineral sources and pieces of infrastructure that Washington believes would harm US security if attacked.
Experts said the cable, published by the whistle-blower website as part of an unauthorised trove of diplomatic correspondence, was a gift for terrorist organisations wanting to harm the United States as it spelt out the pipelines, undersea cables and factories across the world — including a number in Britain — that would cause most damage to US interests if destroyed.
The WikiLeaks disclosures are not only embarrassing for Washington on the world stage – they also pose a fundamental threat to the security of the United States and key allies including Great Britain. And it’s the third time this year that the nefarious organisation has dumped vast numbers of confidential US documents on the Internet with complete impunity, aided and abetted by The New York Times and several international newspapers. …
President Obama has made a practice of apologizing for everything that the president hasn’t liked about the US. Now that he’s gotten the hang of it, the president can apologize for WikiLeaks, as it happened on Obama’s watch. Nile Gardiner blogs in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.
…In the case of Britain, whose partnership with the United States is vital to the defence of the free world, the WikiLeaks disclosures are particularly sensitive. …
…Subjects discussed included British policy on Iran and Afghanistan, the US-UK Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, British defence procurement, and the future of the Anglo-American alliance. These extremely frank, high level discussions between future British government ministers and the new US administration were private affairs never intended for public consumption, and their unveiling to the world’s media will have a chilling effect on future talks like these.
These documents have been released together with more recent sneering assessments from a senior US diplomat of Britain’s deep interest in the Special Relationship, amid concerns in the UK that the Obama administration would downgrade the alliance with London, fears which are described as “paranoid”. British fears about Washington’s distinctly cooler approach towards the UK have of course been subsequently realised with the White House’s assault on BP, and Hillary Clinton’s stab in the back over the Falklands, both of which have gone down badly across the Atlantic. And the official view of the Obama administration was summed up by a senior State Department official in March last year who told The Sunday Telegraph: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”
The Secretary of State will need to work hard to repair the damage caused by the release of sensitive diplomatic cables which were supposed to be kept secret. An apology from the Obama presidency to America’s most important friend on the world stage would be a good start. And please, Mrs. Clinton, let’s have less of the mocking, highly offensive rhetoric from State Department employees about Britain and the Special Relationship, especially at a time when 10,000 British troops are laying their lives on the line alongside their US allies on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
One more from Nile Gardiner on how appeasement is working for the Obama administration. Perhaps more apologies are needed.
Policies of “engagement” with hostile powers are always risky, and frequently lead to embarrassment, as Hillary Clinton discovered last weekend in Bahrain. Foreign Policy.com has a revealing article today detailing the Secretary of State’s futile attempts to greet Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki at the 2010 IISS Manama Security Dialogue, where she was the featured speaker. According to Foreign Policy’s report:
…Everybody at the opening dinner for the 2010 IISS Manama Security Dialogue, where Clinton gave the speech, was watching to see if she and Mottaki would trade words. After all, they were seated only five seats apart. Clinton went out on a limb twice to try to make it happen, but the end result was only an unintelligible mutter from the Iranian leader in the general direction of the secretary. …
The incident was clearly humiliating for the Secretary of State, and strikingly illustrates the futility of the Obama Administration’s failed policy of “constructive engagement” with Iran, which the European Union has been trying for a decade without success. Tehran’s nuclear programme continues to march forward in the face of Washington’s weak-kneed approach, and we are now perilously close to having a nuclear-armed rogue state. …
More security troubles. In the LA Times, Andrew Malcolm reports on the MSM screw-up. Seem all the networks broadcast news of the president’s Afghan trip before he was safely on the ground. All except for FOX.
A growing flap — and concerns — over President Obama’s personal safety and security in the Afghan war zone tonight, given that some American news outlets reported he was there nearly a half-hour before Air Force One actually landed. …
According to news pool reports from Air Force One, already White House officials are investigating how the news embargo was dangerously broken first by ABC News and then CNN and MSNBC.
…In fact, according to TVNewser, Fox News Channel was the only major news outlet to strictly honor the Obama security embargo, waiting and reporting the president’s arrival in Afghanistan two minutes after White House press aides gave the official OK. …
Christopher Booker comments on the latest global warming “convention” in Cancun, in the Telegraph, UK.
If, last week, frozen behind a snowdrift, you heard a faint hysterical squeaking, it might well have been the sound of those 20,000 delegates holed up behind a wall of armed security guards in the sun-drenched Mexican holiday resort of Cancun, telling each other that the world is more threatened by runaway global warming than ever. Between their tequilas and lavish meals paid for by the world’s taxpayers, they heard how, by 2060, global temperatures will have risen by 4 degrees Celsius; how the Maldives and Tuvalu are sinking below the waves faster than ever; how the survival of salmon is threatened by CO2-induced acidification of the oceans; how the UN must ban incandescent light bulbs throughout the world.
…The prediction that global temperatures will rise by four degrees in 50 years comes from that same UK Met Office computer which five weeks ago was telling us we were about to enjoy a “milder than average” winter, after three years when it has consistently got every one of its winter and summer forecasts hopelessly wrong. (And the reason why our local authorities are already fast running out of salt is that they were silly enough to believe them.)
When Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s Head of Climate Change Advice, wanted to fly out from Gatwick to Cancun to tell them that 2010 is the hottest year on record, she was trapped by inches of the same global warming that her £33 million computer had failed to predict. …
It’s sometimes hard to find humor in the tremendous waste and fraud that is global warming, but James Delingpole helps out, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK.
…Signs That Show Man Made Global Warming Is Definitely Still Happening And That Cancun Won’t Be An Almighty Flop.
1. Warm weather
2. Cold weather
3. In-between weather.
4. Dark skies at night
5. Light skies in the morning
6. An unpleasant moist/damp/wet sensation when it rains
7. Ice appearing when the temperature drops below zero …