AFF's Doublethink

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill has been nominated to succeed Ryan Crocker as U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Washington being Washington, I had the good fortune to run into Hill a few weeks back at a local Starbucks. I spoke with him for a few minutes as he waited to meet his daughter, and I have to say, this man could be our ambassador to anywhere. He doesn’t speak Arabic, but he has a truly uncanny ability to put people at ease, and strikes you as remarkably decent right off the bat. I only wish all our diplomats were so good. Glenn Kessler has a good backgrounder on him in today’s Washington Post:

Over the course of four years, Hill was largely responsible for dramatically shifting the Bush administration’s policies on North Korea, despite opposition from Vice President Cheney, who opposed making what he considered concessions to the North Korean government. Hill struck a deal with North Korea and then, step by step, persuaded Pyongyang to halt its nuclear reactor and begin to disable it. . .

Hill’s key ally in this effort was then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but he made little secret of his belief that the administration had badly bungled the North Korean issue in Bush’s first term, when Rice was national security adviser.

In David Sanger’s recently published book, “The Inheritance,” Hill offered a blunt dismissal of his hard-line foes in the administration. “These [expletive deleted] don’t know how to negotiate,” he said. “Everything is Appomattox. It’s just ‘Come out with your hands up.’ ”

Hill has an easy manner and dry sense of humor that may serve him well in the fractious politics of Iraq. He was ambassador to Macedonia when protesters attacked the U.S. Embassy in 1999 over NATO airstrikes in Yugoslavia. In a story Hill loves to recount, the embassy in Macedonia, unlike most overseas missions, did not have Marine guards. The protesters quickly overran the guard posts and began to use the embassy flagpole as a battering ram. When a top State Department official called Hill during the crisis to ask where his Marines were, Hill sardonically noted he didn’t have any — but that there were Marines at the embassy in Luxembourg.

And in case Washington weren’t wonky enough, I happened to be editing a paragraph about State Department efforts to slow nuclear proliferation when Hill appeared before me, putting sugar in his coffee. It felt kind of like the DC version of the Marshall McLuhan cameo in Annie Hall.