Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...with the incompetents you've got," a Senator who supports the Obama Administration's policy told me. "We have no alternative." Holbrooke made a similar point during the hearing. Yes, he said, this situation resembled the war in Vietnam, harking back to his earliest service, as a U.S. diplomat in Saigon. "Structurally, there are many similarities - the enemy sanctuaries across the border, the [failure of] governance, corruption ... but there is one core difference: 9/11," he said. "There was no threat from Vietnam to the U.S. homeland...
...weeks ago, a senior European diplomat arrived in Washington with a message from the Iranian government. The Iranians saw a parallel between the case of captive American journalist Roxana Saberi and that of three Iranian diplomats held by the U.S. military in Iraq. The Iranians were not demanding an exchange of prisoners, the European envoy told TIME, but were setting up a more subtle test of the Obama Administration's intentions. Now that Saberi has been released, Tehran will be watching the U.S. reaction for signs of a reciprocal goodwill gesture...
...remaining civilians can leave. The LTTE are believed to be using them as human shields, but Rajapaksa has been unmoved by entreaties from Western countries to allow aid agencies to enter the war zone to help them. On April 28, the government denied a visa to a Swedish diplomat who was supposed to be part of a European mission to Sri Lanka. On April 29, Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the President's brother, met with the British and French foreign secretaries and upbraided them for being "duped by the misinformation campaign the LTTE was carrying out," according to a report...
...Foggy Bottom, the response could be: Why not, indeed? The worst-kept diplomatic secret in the world may be that the State Department pretty much sees eye to eye with North Korea on a central issue: Washington should deal with Pyongyang one-on-one. The multilateral approach of the six-party talks has been at best cumbersome and at worst counterproductive, some diplomats say. Charles L. (Jack) Pritchard, Bush's former special envoy to the DPRK, has said all the participants in the talks "made it abundantly clear" that they support direct U.S. engagement, including the Chinese, the North...
...Publicly, the Obama Administration made the standard disapproving noises. "A serious step in the wrong direction," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But in truth, North Korea's latest gambit could not have been altogether surprising to anyone in Washington - least of all to the State Department diplomats who have been dealing with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) for the past decade. They know that even in Pyongyang, North Korean officials have access to the Internet. If they cared to, they could have read yesterday's New York Times, which reported that the Obama Administration is considering...