Word: diplomat
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...DECADES HE SUCCEEDED brilliantly in the role of the charming, erudite diplomat. But in 1986, when former Secretary-General of the U.N. Kurt Waldheim was running for President of his native Austria, reporters released documents proving that the former German army lieutenant had, contrary to his claims, been aware of and perhaps involved in war crimes, including the deportation of thousands of Jews to death camps during World War II. Waldheim first denied any knowledge of the atrocities and then said he was protecting his family. He maintained that a conspiracy to defame Austria was at the heart...
...fighters have been adopting al-Qaeda tactics at times. The Ogaden National Liberation Front, a Somali rebel group, killed nine Chinese oil workers and 65 Ethiopians at a rig in eastern Ethiopia in April. A diplomat in Nairobi warns of a "third front in the war on terror." The parallels to Iraq, which the U.S. alleged had links to al-Qaeda, only to invade and create them by sowing chaos and anti-U.S. sentiment, are plain. "America's aggression helped us a lot," explains jihadi commander Mohammed Mahmood Ali in Mogadishu. "We got a lot of support from that...
Studying Kim Jong Il requires, as one of the few who made a living at it once declared, "a certain defective personality type." Said retired U.S. diplomat Daniel Jackson, "Not only do you have to enjoy banging your head against a wall, you have to feel vaguely guilty about it on those rare occasions when you don't, in fact, have a headache." With the dramatic, surprise trip by U.S. envoy Christopher Hill to Pyongyang after the regime's promise about nuclear inspection - all part of a recent slew of backing-and-forthing between the Hermit Kingdom and the rest...
...optimists say that Kim has effectively made the decision, as one east Asia diplomat put it, "to do a deal that serves his interests." Stripped of the anodyne diplomatic language, he means Kim has decided to be bought. This camp believes that over the past year, Kim has decided, under steady pressure from an increasingly impatient Beijing, that he has little to lose from allowing North Korea to come out of its largely self-imposed isolation, accepting the blandishments of the Americans, the South Koreans and the Japanese - that is, fuel oil, economic aid, the renewal of full diplomatic relations...
...same time, the optimists believe, Kim has sent signals that he is receptive to change in North Korea. They believe an early 2006 visit to the booming Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Shanghai was, as one former U.S. diplomat puts it, "for dough, not for show: he wants to see if there are ways to get a piece of the economic action for the North without losing control." This is the path Kim is now on, the optimists believe, and though he will be maddeningly quarrelsome in the process, they believe he will live up to his side...