There was a very interesting Q&A yesterday at the National Conference of Editorial Writers between members of the press and R. Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary for Political Affairs. His answers to the questions presented were quite forthcoming and gives us an insightful glimpse into the workings of the U.S. foreign policy making process, and the mind of a career diplomat. Cuba was mentioned once. It’s a little long, but I think well worth the read.
Excerpt from Secretary Burn’s closing remarks on the extent of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, and possible weapon production:
We don’t believe Iran has that capability now. We’re not saying that. But our working assumption internationally is they intend to get it. So what we’ve done is — this is President Putin’s idea and we’ve supported it. The U.S., Russia, China, and the Europeans have said, “We’ll go build you, Iran, a civil nuclear power system. We’ll build it. We’ll give you the technology, we’ll make the commercial contracts.” And the Russians have been leading, saying, “But we won’t let you have access to the sensitive parts of the fuel cycle on Iranian territory, enrichment reprocessing. We’ll do that offshore, we’ll send in the fuel, we’ll take back the spent fuel.”
This is a Putin proposal which we have supported now for about a year-and-a-half, so it takes away the Iranian argument. Ahmadi-Nejad tells his own people, “The international community wants to deny us the right to civil nuclear power,” and it takes away that argument and it’s the basis of our offer to negotiate. We’re happy to help build them a system, but we won’t give them the ability to produce fissile material or nuclear warheads, obviously. That’s what we’re going to deny them, we hope.
With U.S. diplomats mapping strategy with the Russians and Chinese, were going to need a lot more than luck, we desperately need more capable leadership and we need someone with enough guts to clean out the State Department.
Read it here.
The chances of cleaning out leftist bureacrats out of the State Dept. are about the same as the chances of wiping out dictators in latin America.
For reasons that baffle me, that agency is filled with entrenched career leftist and teacherous elements that don’t care if they sell their own country down the river. No one’s been able to weed these people out, in my opinion, because no one at the top has been willing to take the heat that goes with it.
If/when we get another democratic or RINO (Republican in name only)administration, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the likes of Sandy Berger at the top of the State Dept. It’s a cesspool of commies.