I will be getting into Mexico City late tonight and am returning to Washington on Saturday. I do have TWN readers in Mexico — quite a number of them — but don’t know where they are located. So email me if interested in a blog politics coffee session either Friday afternoon or Saturday morning.
Richard Armitage co-chaired with former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown my very first Council on Foreign Relations study group when I moved to Washington in the mid-1990s. He’s an interesting man — tied deeply into Japan affairs. But truth in advertising — Armitage and I have very different views of Japan’s path to normal nationhood….
The Quartet New York meeting, including its commitment to creating a mechanism to re-start Palestinian assistance, could mark the re-emergence of this international foursome (US, EU, Russia, UN) as a force in Middle East peace.
(European Parliament Member Cem Oezdemir) Recently, I wrote about an important interim report that was issued by a Temporary Committee of the European Parliament investigating the complicity of European governments in illegally collaborating and cooperating with the CIA on secret enemy combatant detention centers and clandestine rendition-related flight traffic.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert is seriously confused about who scores gains and who loses if Michael Hayden is confirmed as successor to Porter Goss as Director of Central Intelligence.
On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman suggested the banding together and rationalization of Western European coal and steel production. This was the spark of the incremental intertwining of sovereignty, currencies, and aspiration into what is now the European Union. The 9th of May is now memorialized as “Europe Day“.
(President George W. Bush and Lt. General Michael Hayden) The crack team that puts out the American Progress Action Fund’s “Progress Report” has its Mike Hayden review out, and its predictably critical. But they get the Michael Hayden picture half-wrong.
Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is pulling a slick and interesting move in US-Iran diplomacy by sending President Bush the first letter from an Iranian President to a U.S. President in 27 years. This is clever. The Europeans have been our interlocutors with Iran, but that hasn’t been enough.
Tony Blair is demoting British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to serve as Leader of Parliament’s Lower House. Margaret Becket, who has been serving as Secretary of State for the Environment, will succeed Straw. Straw is taking the same path of the late Robin Cook when he was demoted from the Foreign Secretary portfolio.