Richard Holbrooke: An American Diplomat
A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of America’s top diplomats gathered at the State Department for a Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Richard Holbrooke’s career embodies some of the least attractive traits of contemporary American diplomacy.
As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Jimmy Carter, Holbrooke was instrumental in securing continued U.S. support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1997 he authorized arms deliveries to Indonesia in violation of the supposed U.S. arms embargo against Suharto’s regime. It was during this period the suppression of the Christian Timorese by the Muslim Indonesians reached genocidal levels, killing 200,000 people or about a third of the island’s population. Holbrooke’s 1997 response to a reporter’s question about the tragedy to which he had directly contributed was illustrative of his character and style: “I want to stress I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed. People were killed and that always is a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today… [As for the numbers of victims] … we are never going to know anyway. “
True to form, Holbrooke lied to Congress in 1979 that the famine in East Timor – caused by the Indonesian army’s scorched-earth campaign – was a belated consequence of Portuguese colonial misrule. Over two decades later, in a lavish tribute to the diplomatic skill of his friend Paul Wolfowitz – who was the US ambassador to Indonesia at that time – Holbrooke boasted how “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep East Timor out of the [1980] presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”
Far from “bringing peace to Bosnia” at Dayton in 1995, Holbrooke presided over the imposition of a package broadly similar to the 1992 Lisbon Plan brokered by the European Union – the deal which could have avoided the war altogether but which was deliberately torpedoed from Washington. The chief outcome of the Bosnian war was a NATO transformed into a tool of U.S. hegemony, and the renewal of American dominance in European affairs to an extent not seen since Kennedy. The settlement at Dayton was not unlike a plausible compromise that would have been reached much earlier had America remained on the sidelines; but the meaning of Dayton was evident from Holbrooke’s boast, a year later, “We are re-engaged in the world, and Bosnia was the test.”
As special representative to Cyprus in 1997, Holbrooke irritated the Europeans by his strident advocacy of Turkey’s membership in the European Union. His bias in favor of Muslim Turks against Christian Greeks in the divided island reflected a consistent bipartisan trend in U.S. foreign policy making. Holbrooke was not the creator of that trend, but he was its enthusiastic supporter – from Indonesia to Bosnia, from Cyprus to Kosovo.
In 1998 Holbrooke was back in the Balkans, preparing the ground for Clinton’s Kosovo war against Serbia. On June 24 of that year he met with the KLA commander Gani Shehu in the village of Junik, near the Yugoslav-Albanian border, dutifully taking his shoes off like a good dhimmi. He promised American support for the the KLA campaign of violence against the Serbs. Earlier that year Clinton’s Balkans envoy Robert Gelbard correctly characterized the KLA as a terrorist organization, but Holbrooke’s visit signified a change of policy and directly led to Racak, Rambouillet, NATO bombing, and Kosovo’s transformation into the Jihadist mafia state that it is today.
The most eloquent epitaphs are crafted while the person is still alive. Borrowing a page out of Richard Holbrooke’s diplomatic manual, Vice President Joe Biden called him “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, until last March the top UN official in Afghanistan, said five weeks ago of Holbrooke’s Afghan performance, “This is not the Balkans, where you can bully people into accepting a solution.” Eide added that the U.S. Special Envoy did not fully grasp “the complexity of the Afghan political scene.”
Holbrooke’s grasp of the complexities was illustrated by his calling the Serbs “murderous assholes” and by referring to Radovan Karadzic as the Osama Bin Laden of Europe. He was “synonymous with American foreign policy,” indeed: he was a coarse, arrogant bully who understood diplomacy as the art of imposing one’s will at the point of a gun. Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was a bad man advocating and implementing bad policies.
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Another trenchant analysis by Dr Trifkovic; it's insight is exceeded only by the sadness it engenders, because it so accurately portrays the boorish insanity of our beloved government's foreign policy.
Is it any wonder the US is so reviled in so many places when one considers the fruits of our policies? Yet all good neocons and their useful idiot minions will continue to believe that we are hated only because we have larger refrigerators and that we can shop for them at midnight! Yes, we're loathed because of our "freedom" and not because we sponsor genocidal policies and have a special affinity for destroying Christian communities across the globe.
" Yes, we’re loathed because of our “freedom” "
Pat Buchanan once made this into a neo-con fairy tale;
One day in a far away land a man named Osama Bin Laden who lived in a most remote and mountainous region of the world discovered a dusty old copy of parchment entitled, The Declaration of Independence, which was written in old english and scripted by the hands of men known as "Founding Fathers". After translating the document into Arabic, then to Farsi, then Greek and Latin and back to English, Mr. Laden went berserk upon seeing and reading the word, Freedom. And although some pin-head had already predicted the end of history and perhaps freedom too, (in a very prestigious and conservative journal no less) this demoniac Bin Laden decided to make more history anyway by attacking freedom wherever she could be found.
This is Paul Harvey and now you know the rest of ........
Ms. from a reader who'd rather stay anonymous:
"If Dicky and Hashim the Snake were such great pals, couldn't the latter have rushed a Serb heart to save the former?"
Dr. T & Co.
Concerning Serbia and Serbs, is Biden noticeably different from Holbrooke?
Wishful thinking on my part perhaps: the timing of the recent report on Thaci might be a way of dissing Holbrooke to go along with Western disgust with the Albanian nationalists.
One of the WikiLeak pieces highlights how Kosovo has become more crime ridden since the 1999 Clinton admin. led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Serbia & Montenegro).
"Over two decades later, in a lavish tribute to the diplomatic skill of his friend Paul Wolfowitz – who was the US ambassador to Indonesia at that time – Holbrooke boasted how “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep East Timor out of the [1980] presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”
Doesn't this passage say it all? The two birds of prey of American diplomacy: neoconservatives (Wolfowitz) and neoliberals (Holbrooke). No wonder they're friends.
Trenchant.Now I just wait for similar words concerning Mme. Albright...
Holbrooke boasted how “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep East Timor out of the [1980] presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”
The GOP-Neo-cons have done a great job of keeping the costly debacle of Iraq out of the media as well. It was hardly mentioned at all in the last election cycle. I still hope that Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul will enter the GOP debates so they can mention the duplicity of spending billions on military and foreign aid abroad while asking Americans to work longer for much less to sustain the whole hopeless enterpize for "four more years, four more years,....
It's not all war and gore, the state department does engage in other activities:
http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=29799
"A U.S. lesbian diplomat and her partner who helped found Albania's gay movement while stationed there were honored at the State Department on Dec. 2 with the Secretary of State Award for Outstanding Volunteerism Overseas."
@7 Ah! That explains the recent gay pride parade in Kosovo. Not withstanding Holbrooke was one of the best and brightest in the wonderful success, Vietnam.
With his final words before going under the knife, "You've got to stop the war in Afghanista!", we can say of Holbrooke what was said of the rebellious Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth, "Nothing became his life so much as the leaving of it."
Here is an example of a man who Chronicles readers would willfully honor upon his death.
You're critically wounded and dying in
the jungle somewhere in the Central Highlands of Viet Nam ..
It's November 11, 1967.
LZ (landing zone) X-ray.
Your unit is outnumbered 8-1 and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 yards away, that your CO (commanding officer) has ordered the MedEvac helicopters to stop coming in.
You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns and you know you're not getting out.
Your family is half way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again.
As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.
Then - over the machine gun noise - you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter.
You look up to see a Huey coming in. But ... It doesn't seem real because no MedEvac markings are on it.
Captain Ed Freeman is coming in for you.
He's not MedEvac so it's not his job, but he heard the radio call and decided he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire anyway.
Even after the MedEvacs were ordered
not to come.
He's coming anyway.
And he drops it in and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 3 of you
at a time on board.
Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire to the doctors and nurses
and safety.
And, he kept coming back!! 13 more times!! ... until all the wounded were out. No one knew until the mission was over that the Captain had been hit 4 times in the legs and left arm.
He took 29 of you and your buddies out that day.
Medal of Honor Recipient, Captain Ed Freeman, United States Air Force,
died last Wednesday at the age of 70, in Boise, Idaho
How could anyone add anything to this article.........
My sincere thanks to Mr. Trifkovic and Mr. Fleming as well.
Richard Holbrooke was a bad man indeed. He was a living proof of real existance of evil agendas from dark, fiction novels to all of us.
Good news is that he, in particular, will not inflict any more damage to humanity. I have reasons to believe that "remarkable diplomatic skills" of this man included a lot of deals and promisses in verbal form signed only by a handshake. It will be probaly interesting to observe the "stage" in next few years.
Bad news are much more extensive. He was not the first nor the last, and certainly not the only one of his kind. As we very well know, it takes enormous amount of time just to identify these "Evildoer's Leutenants and Captains", nevermind recognising and comprehending their deeds. Besides, it seems, for some time now, that there is no governing body in our part of the World, which employs decent, honest and benevolent ones. So, we did not gain much by his death.
P.S.
Heart can be transplanted with relative sucess. Aorta is much funnier task. Serbian hearts might be exeptional but their aortas are just ordinary. Besides, I am not so sure that Serbian parts function properly in transplanted environments............
Re Captain Freeman: It was November 14, 1965. And he passed on August 20, 2008.
Dear Dr. Trifkovic - One thing that blew my mind about the war against Serbia was that NATO had the German Luftwaffe bomb Serbia. In fact, I think the Luftwaffe commander was a World War II German ace. Considering the vicious fighting in Yugoslavia during World War II, where was NATO mind at when they did that? Also, isn't there some very valuable mine in Serbia or Kosovo that George Soros picked up for song during this time?
Excellent article, Dr. Trifkovic!
But according to the NY Times and its moronic columnist (Roger Cohen), holbrooke deserved a Nobel price lol. Check out the link, but be careful not to puke when you read the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/opinion/17cohen.html?ref=opinion
"Living in three time zones — past, present and future — he liked to invoke history, for it was prologue. Living in three identities doer, observer and chronicler — his persuasive arsenal was intricate, part dagger, part whimsy. He knew how to close and how closing depended on a balance of forces."
Well, if history is prologue why do we still not know the last name of his parents? Huummnn!!
Expert 82
See "Taming the Bullies of Bosnia by Mr Cohen back in 1995." Mass graves, executions, concentration camps, etc.. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/17/magazine/taming-the-bullies-of-bosnia.html?pagewanted=2
"The Srebrenica operation is a rerun of what happened on a much wider scale in 1992, the first year of the war, when about three-quarters of a million Muslims were chased at gunpoint from their homes and herded into camps. "
I stopped reading after the 3/4 of muslims part, let me get this straight, three quarters is 750,000 people. Huh, what a lier and what a bunch of bs.
The latest praise comes from Adm Mike Mullen who calls Holbrooke a man of peace, I guess for bringing peace to the Balkans.
http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/133971-richard-holbrooke-a-great-man-of-peace
Soldiers don't count............whatever brings a stop to flying bullets can be considered: Peace.
Soldiers suppose to be politicaly neutral........policemen and priests also.
If Adm. Mullen wants to discredit himself so badly in front of serious people, let him do so. It is just joining the gallery anyway.
Richard Holbrooke was a guest on Diane Rheem's show at NPR, when I got lucky enough to get through by phone. I asked a very simple question:
"Sir, do you, or do you not, think that the consequences of a poorly executed American foreign policy will be far reaching since all the men and women who died as a result of our warped assessments have children and the odds are that their children and grandchildren will hold a grudge against America for generations to come - what if we were even a little wrong on any of the many foreign assignments where we are sending our troops?"
ANSWER: The demand for visitor's visas to the U.S. are at an all time high. People are fighting to come to the United States and we remain, by far, the most popular destination on Earth - that should tell you how right or wrong our policies are.
P.S.
Do those eager visitors include the Mohammed Atta and his gang that flew our civilian planes into the WTC?
This is by far the worst example of American politics and what the world has ever seen. Nobody has caused greater damage to the United States image abroad. May he find his friends Adolf, Josif, Heinrich, Mao and the like in the same place. They will be nice and warm for a long long time.
Iliya,
I can't say how involved Mr.Holbrooke was in helping Iraqi Christians relocate to the US, but this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11669994
is probably what he meant about the US becoming one of the more popular destinations and why. It seems when you are hell bent on spread democracy and freedom at any cost, the price gets really high, really quick. I am sure the economics of it all was worked out years ago in some back issue of The Weekly Standard or National Review; so in the long run Christians in Iraq will be better off living in the new slums of Detroit than the old plains of Nineveh. Yet, their ungrateful testimony seems to indicate that some of our kindness is actually killing them.