Christopher Hill, Obama’s Choice to Be Iraq Ambassador, Showed Poor Judgment and Dishonesty as N. Korea Negotiator

I guess we can add another name to the list of those who have little use for Christopher Hill, the front-runner to be President Obama’s next ambassador to Iraq:

General Anthony Zinni, the former top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said the Obama administration offered him the Baghdad job late last month but withdrew the appointment without explanation, apparently in favor of a veteran diplomat, Christopher Hill.

With Zinni fuming in undiplomatic fashion about the way he was treated, the question of who should be the next ambassador to Iraq has turned into an embarrassing mess for the Obama administration as it struggles to recover from other stumbles over high-profile nominations. There has still been no formal announcement about the Iraq job.

“By any measure, Zinni is one of the most talented military officers of his generation,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a specialist on Iraq at the Brookings Institution. “The bigger issue for the country and the Obama administration is to make sure they explain themselves. Otherwise, people will assume the worst motives.” [IHT, Eric Shmitt and Mark Landler]

Hill is very close to former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who has been named a special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a relationship that sparked speculation in the foreign policy community that Holbrooke may have weighed in for Hill to get the job. [Al Kamen, Washington Post]

I lack the knowledge of Zinni’s talents to speak to them, but I doubt that anyone in this country has given Christopher Hill’s recent performance the kind of colonoscopy I have at this site. Hill has earned an infamous legacy as the man who talked George W. Bush into abandoning a financial constriction strategy that was working, a more robust version of which could have forced the verifiable disarmament of Kim Jong Il or ended his misrule without firing a shot. Instead, Hill talked Bush into investing the remainder of his time in office in an ill-conceived and now irreversibly failed “Agreed Framework II.” As a result, America lost its last best chance to save thousands of North Korean lives and prevent North Korea from selling its merchandise of terror to the highest bidder.

Failure, of course, is a risk for even the best-conceived plans, but Hill’s plan was patently and predictably doomed from its conception: throwing away all of our leverage over North Korea in exchange for … Kim Jong Il’s word. Even Chris Hill apparently doubted that such a plan could work, judging by this poison pen missive to Fox News’s James Rosen:

Do you really think we could make concessions on the basis of an incomplete declaration, then somehow we would be able to return to the contentious issues AFTER ““ AFTER!!!??? — giving away all our leverage? Why? I can tell you this stupidity has never been under consideration by anyone who is part of the process or truly close to the process. [James Rosen, National Review]

But that is exactly what Hill persuaded Bush to do just months later.

Perhaps most unforgiveably, Hill lacks two things that no American diplomat should: (1) a sense of the values he is charged to represent (Asked about the North Korean regime’s atrocities toward its people, Hill demurred: “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.”), and (2) personal integrity.

There simply is no way to say this delicately: Hill is not a truthful man, which is a matter that goes beyond my disagreement with his views. Those are strong words, and I’m prepared to support them by citing examples. First, I cite Hill’s November 2007 denial that the North Koreans had provided him a (woefully incomplete) nuclear declaration at a meeting in Pyongyang. The North Koreans later contradicted Hill’s denial, saying that they were all done declaring, thanks, and the State Department had to offer a mush-mouthed clarification that what the North Koreans had tried to give Hill didn’t really count as a declaration.

Later, as Hill pressed the Bush Administration to de-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, a Washington Post reporter asked Hill whether he’d ever seen a letter from Esther Kim, the widow of U.S. lawful permanent resident Rev. Kim Dong Shik. Rev. Kim was kidnapped by North Korean agents in China in 2002 while assisting North Korean refugees, an act of international terrorism against a U.S. person. One of the agents was later caught and convicted by a South Korean court. Hill denied having received Mrs. Kim’s appeal, in which she sought Hill’s help to bring her husband’s remains home for burial. Shortly thereafter, a knowledgeable reader sent me photographs of Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen handing Mrs. Kim’s letter to Assistant Secretary Hill. It’s always possible that Hill simply tossed the letter out, of course (in which case, go back two paragraphs and see (1)).

I’ll note that the case of Rev. Kim did not play out to President Obama’s credit, either.

More broadly, Hill continued to sell the President, the Secretary of State, and the American people a diplomatic initiative ostensibly aimed at denuclearizing North Korea, long after North Korea had forcefully repudiated any such intention. Yet it took the visit of former U.S. diplomat Jack Pritchard to Pyongyang in the summer of 2008 for us to learn that. In May of 2008, Pritchard told a Washington Post reporter what the North Koreans had told him, and what the North Koreans had obviously been telling Hill for months: “that the United States should get used to a nuclear-armed North Korea.” Not long afterward, the North Koreans cornered Condi Rice face-to-face and demanded “to be recognized as a nuclear state.” Since then, the North Koreans have repeatedly insisted that they will not give up their nuclear weapons. Surely Chris Hill knew this long ago. Surely every person of average judgment knew it from the very beginning. But for reasons known only to Hill, he continued to press his bosses for more concessions and fewer conditions long after the North Koreans had taken their considerable winnings home.

Hill got away with this in the North Korean case because he had the unconditional love of most of the reporters who covered him. Part of this is probably a matter of political accord between Hill and those reporters, but part of it must also be Hill’s glib charm — which is on display when his ferocious temper isn’t. As the transcripts of his press conferences show, Hill knows how to work a crowd. But glibness will not substitute for good judgment or toughness, and it won’t continue to deceive the media if, as seems inevitable, some significant portion of the press turns against the new administration’s Iraq policy. And in a place where so many lives and dollars could depend on one man’s judgment and integrity, this country surely can do better.

Update: A well informed reader who covers this story for a well-respected newspaper e-mails to take issue with my “unconditional love” characterization. He probably knows a lot of things I don’t, but I certainly didn’t read much skeptical coverage of Hill was doing, how he was doing it, or the real newsworthiness of some of his bureau’s most obvious publicity stunts. Frankly, I still don’t see it even after the collapse of the entire effort. I would have become a loyal reader of any reporter who had consistently questioned what we were remotely likely to gain in exchange for all these concessions. Is the same level of scrutiny we’d expect to see directed toward, say, John Bolton too much to ask?