Hillary Clinton - Tag Search

Josh Rogin from Foreign Policy published an important report this week on what we've dubbed the Mubarak trust fund. The U.S. Congress already approved a $50 million endowment for the Egyptian government, essentially a pot of money the Mubarak regime can use however it wants.

Evan did a comprehensive roundup of the news from Afghan president Hamid Karzai's visit to Washington this week. Just one thing to add from me.

I have a post over on Al-Jazeera's Web site looking at Afghanistan's ongoing governance problems, none of which received much (public) attention during Karzai's visit. One thing I couldn't really address, for space reasons, is how these problems influence perceptions of the upcoming Kandahar campaign/operation/process/whatever we're calling it these days.

During Afghan President Hamid Karzai's first 48 hours in Washington, D.C. -- the first half of a four-day visit that comes at a momentous time in his country's history -- the recently re-elected leader chose a distinctly non-Afghan issue to emphasize: a visit he paid on Tuesday morning to injured American troops at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

During brief remarks after the trip, before his meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai spoke only of the visit, calling it "an extremely painful moment." Later that day, at a reception in his honor, Karzai brought it up again. "That was a moment of immense thinking for me as a person," he said. On Wednesday, during a joint press conference after meeting with President Obama, the Walter Reed visit -- "a very difficult moment" -- was on the tip of Karzai's tongue, to the exclusion of more controversial issues, such as Karzai's April diatribe against alleged Western interference in the October presidential election that he won.

That Karzai was reportedly "visibly moved" by the sight of devastated American soldiers is understandable and even laudable, but Karzai's repeated public mentions of the visit seemed to deliver a political message as well: I understand your sacrifice, I am your friend, but I still need you to be there for me.

As the NPT conference opens today in New York City, a number of states and international actors arrive at the table with competing interests. The United States, United Nations and European Union would like to avoid a repeat of the last conference, five years ago, which collapsed over disagreements on disarmament and squabbles regarding Iran and North Korea. The Obama Administration, by signing a mutual arms reduction agreement with Russia last month, hopes it has laid the groundwork for some good will.

Iran, meanwhile, will push back against an apparently growing consensus among the P5+1 to sanction the country for its lack of transparency and alleged violations of the NPT. China and Russia, which tend to give Iran a long leash in Security Council affairs, have -- at least in according to White House spin -- come closer in recent weeks to accepting such sanctions.

Rounding out the agenda are the traditional issues: the meat and potatoes of disarmament, nonproliferation and access to peaceful nuclear energy. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Yukiya Amano, the new chief of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, would both like more countries to sign up for additional inspections, while the Egyptian-led bloc of non-aligned nations will push again for its 15-year-old plan for a nuke-free Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Obama in the White House on Tuesday, capping a two-week flap between the United States and Israel that began with the poorly timed approval of 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel amid the beginning of so-called "proximity talks" between Netanyahu's government and the Palestinian Authority.

On Monday night, Netanyahu showed no sign of caving to U.S. pressure that he rescind the the approval order and prevent such acts in the future, telling a conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem is "not a settlement," but rather the capital of Israel, despite Palestinian hopes that East Jerusalem can be the capital of their future state.

The State Department -- a little belatedly -- sent out a transcript of Hillary Clinton's AIPAC conference speech. We've posted the full text after the jump.

The U.S.-Israel spat is winding down. The White House insists there's no crisis in bilateral relations; George Mitchell is scheduled to arrive in Israel tomorrow; congressional leaders (with a few exceptions) say the public fighting should end. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will deliver a speech at the AIPAC conference on Monday morning, and her remarks will almost certainly mark the end of the Ramot Shlomo kerfuffle.

Who came out ahead? Ethan Bronner tries to answer that question in the New York Times, and points out that both sides are declaring victory -- Obama, because he received a few guarantees from Israel; Netanyahu, because he didn't have to compromise on Jerusalem.

The conventional wisdom in Washington (and, perhaps, Jerusalem) is that President Obama wants to blow up Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's governing coalition. The current governing bloc includes Likud and a smattering of right-wing parties (plus Labor, but it's clearly a junior partner); Obama supposedly wants to replace the right-wing parties with Tzipi Livni's Kadima movement.

I can't tell you whether or not this is Obama's explicit goal. But it's a guaranteed outcome if Obama decides to press Netanyahu on stopping new construction in East Jerusalem -- because the rightists in Netanyahu's coalition will never accept such a freeze.

Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League -- last seen using his position to attack noted anti-Semite Joe Biden -- now wants everyone to know that the main force undermining Middle East peace is the Obama administration's "flawed policy" and not, say, Israel's inflexible right-wing government.

Gregg and I have been wondering for a couple of days how the United States would respond to being publicly embarrassed by an Israeli government that seems bent on continuing with the expansion of illegal settlements even as the West tries to organize highly sensitive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

We didn't have to wait that long: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a 43-minute phone conversation on Friday morning to rebuke the Israeli leader about the "deeply negative signal" his government sent by approving more settler homes in East Jerusalem. Could this be the first sign of a tougher Obama administration approach toward Israel?

Another voice in Washington -- actually, another eight voices -- urging President Obama not to appoint an ambassador to Syria.

This time it's a group of Republican senators, who sent a letter yesterday to secretary of state Hillary Clinton that basically dubbed the nomination a concession to Bashar al-Assad. The letter asked if the Obama administration will sanction Syria for failing to meet its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, and argued that the recent Assad-Hassan Nasrallah-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meeting should spike the nomination.

Can the U.S. stop Israel from attacking its neighbors? Sen. John Kerry thinks the Israeli government wouldn't bomb Iran without American approval.

Kerry's actual remarks are a little more caveated than the Ha'aretz headline suggests, but my interpretation is that he doesn't think Israel will attack Iran unless Obama admits diplomacy has failed and gives Netanyahu the green light.

I'm a couple of days late in posting this, but Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim had a great line about freedom of speech during a Q&A with Hillary Clinton at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha.

"I want to tell you that we have freedom of expression in Egypt. The question is freedom after expression, thats what's lacking."

Clinton has been on something of a media blitz all week: The State Department has sent reporters dozens of transcripts of interviews, including segments with Al-Arabiya and Al-Hurra. She even did an appearance on Al-Jazeera's Arabic network, which U.S. officials don't do nearly often enough.

This is a guest post from Tom Evans, a journalist at the BBC in London.

The election of Barack Obama was accompanied by great hope that the damages wrought by the Bush administration's foreign policy could be mended over. Obama's campaign team emphasized the fresh approach that would follow an Obama victory. Much has been made of the apparent failure of his efforts so far: Coming face to face with the difficult realities of American foreign policy, the Obama administration has faltered.

The Arab-Israeli peace process remains deadlocked. After the early promise of the Cairo speech, in which the president indicated that pressure would be put on the Israeli government to halt settlement construction, his administration has fallen back on the easy answer that the Arabs must do more to ease Israeli worries. Thousands of miles away, one can hear Netanyahu's relieved sigh.

Despite a new strategy in Afghanistan, there has been little progress. Yesterday, the coalition's highly-anticipated Operation Moshtarak, intended to signal U.S. General Stanley McChrystal's emphasis on hearts and minds, was almost immediately clouded by the accidental killing of 12 Afghan civilians. And Guantanamo Bay, that persistent guilty conscience of American policy, remains open, despite promises to the contrary.

The escalating war of words over Iran's nuclear program, and possible sanctions against Iran, is pretty predictable. U.S. officials say Iran has left the world no choice but to impose new sanctions; Gen. James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, said on Sunday that current proposals are "not mild sanctions. These are very tough sanctions."

Tehran responded with a warning of sorts: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the West it will regret sanctioning Iran, and threatened a "response" against anyone "seek[ing] to create problems for Iran."

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the annual Munich Security Conference that a deal on shipping Iranian uranium out of the country to be enriched could be reached in the "not too distant future," according to the BBC.

"Under the present conditions that we have reached, I think that we are approaching a final agreement that can be accepted by all parties," he said.

American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brushed aside Mottaki's remarks, which were welcomed by China, saying: "The fact is we haven't really seen much in the way of response ... Sometimes we see a response from a part of the government that is then retracted from another part of the government."

Western diplomats are apparently pushing ahead with new sanctions on Iran, despite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's offer to ship low-enriched uranium out of the country for several months.

US and European diplomats are pushing for an expanded travel ban on officials connected with Iran's nuclear program, and tougher restrictions on Iranian banks.

(Updated below) The U.S. Senate -- a glacially slow body when it comes to domestic legislation -- voted overwhelmingly last night to allow President Obama to impose economic sanctions on Iran's gasoline suppliers.

The House of Representatives approved similar legislation last month. The bills are different, so a conference committee will need to work out the differences before Obama can sign the bill into law. Both allow Obama to sanction companies that provide refined gasoline to Iran; the Senate bill also strengthens export controls, which would further limit the technology that can be exported to Iran.

Time for a little compare-and-contrast exercise on Yemen policy. Here's a snippet from the excellent Human Rights Watch memo published on Saturday:

Yemen's allies should not explicitly or implicitly give unqualified support for President Saleh's government, but instead demand an end to torture, arbitrary arrests, and the government's crackdown on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. They should ensure that foreign aid does not strengthen, and is not perceived as strengthening, the repressive apparatus of the state.

And here's Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, at a press conference on Yemen yesterday.

I think it's important to underscore a few points about what is going on in our relationship with Yemen. First of all, it is very much a two-prong strategy we have. There's been a lot of attention paid to the work we're doing with the Yemeni Government to increase its ability to take care of its own security threats and to take on, in particular, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. That is vitally important.

Maybe Benjamin misspoke; maybe he meant the U.S. wants the Yemeni government to deal with AQAP by itself, out of respect for Yemeni sovereignty. But the phrasing is critically important here: When Benjamin says "its own security threats," officials in Sana'a hear "the Huthis and the southern separatists."

And if Benjamin didn't misspeak, then tis is the second high-level statement in a week encouraging the Yemeni government to use U.S. security assistance to fight its domestic insurgencies (the first came from secretary of state Hillary Clinton).

Update: Here's a link to the memo on HRW's Web site.

Original post: I'm not sure if it's available online yet, but Human Rights Watch sent us an advance copy (pdf) of a new memo, Seven Principles for Effective International Engagement in Yemen, which they're releasing ahead of next week's London conference on Yemen. We're posting it here as a PDF file.

The memo covers everything from development aid to the importance of closing Guantanamo Bay, but the most important section -- from my perspective -- deals with the human rights abuses committed by the Yemeni government in its conflicts with Huthi rebels in the north and separatists in the south.