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An important point on who are rulers are. The close connection of
Wall Street and US foreign policy is enacted by Holbrooke. <br>
<br>
He graduated from Brown in 1962, went immediately to the Foreign
Service and (probably) the CIA. (Recruitment for the former was by
an examination - like the ACT or GRE - and interview by employed
agents.) A year later, after Vietnamese language training, he was
sent to Vietnam as a civilian representative for the Agency for
International Development (the standard CIA cover) working on the
rural Pacification Program (part of the notorious "Strategic
Hamlets" program, which turned villages in to concentraion camps in
order to keep the population away form the "Viet Cong," the
Vietnamese resistance to the American directed governmetn). <br>
<br>
Holbrooke then moved to the US Embassy, Saigon where he became a
staff assistant to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge,
Jr. During this time, he served with many other young diplomats who
would play a major role in American foreign policy in the decades
ahead, including John Negroponte, Anthony Lake, Frank G. Wisner, Les
Aspin, and Peter Tarnoff (war criminals all). As the US "escalated"
the killing in Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson formed a team of
Vietnam experts to work in the White House under the former head of
the Phoenix Program, R.W. Komer - an admitted mass-murderer - in an
operation that was separate from the National Security Council. As a
rising young diplomat with significant experience in the country,
Holbrooke was asked to join the group when he was only twenty-four
years old. (Why?)<br>
<br>
Holbrooke's later record is increasingly awful, not so much
Yugoslavia, but earlier. For example, In the Indonesian atrocities
in eastern Timor, where he was the official in charge, and evaded
demands to stop the US support for them.<br>
<br>
In Kosovo, preparation for war crimes trials began in May 1999, in
the midst of the NATO bombing campaign, expedited at the initiative
of Washington and London, which also provided unprecedented access
to intelligence information. In East Timor, investigations were
discussed at leisure, with numerous delays and deference to
Jakarta's wishes and sensibilities. "It's an absolute joke, a
complete whitewash," Lucia Withers, a spokeswoman for Amnesty
International, informed the British press: it will "cause East
Timorese even more trauma than they have suffered already"; a
leading Indonesian role "would be really insulting at this stage."
Few seriously expected that the U.S. or U.K. would release vital
intelligence information, and the Indonesian generals were reported
to feel confident that their old friends will not let them down - if
only because the chain of responsibility might be hard to snap at
just the right point. By mid-January, UN officials said that a
tribunal was unlikely. U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and others
"are pinning their hopes on an internal tribunal held by Indonesia,
whose military controlled East Timor from 1975 until August and is
blamed by human-rights groups for the atrocities." It was claimed
that China and Russia were blocking a tribunal, an obstacle that the
West cannot think of any way to overcome, unlike the case of Serbia.
[NYT, Boston Globe]<br>
<br>
Daniel Southerland reported that "in deferring to Indonesia on [the
East Timor] issue, the Carter administration, like the Ford
administration before it, appears to have placed big-power concerns
ahead of human rights." Southerland referred particularly to the
role of UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who had direct
responsibility for implementing Carter's policy, and was so little
concerned by the consequences - by then, some 200,000 killed - that
he could find no time to testify before Congress about East Timor,
Southerland reports, though "he did have the time, however, to play
host at a black-tie dinner later the same day." [Butler, The Eye
(Australia), 1999. ] <br>
<br>
The guiding principles were well understood by those responsible for
guaranteeing the success of Indonesia's 1975 invasion. They were
articulated lucidly by UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan ... The
Security Council condemned the invasion and ordered Indonesia to
withdraw, but to no avail. In his 1978 memoirs, Moynihan explains
why:<br>
<br>
"The United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked
to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United
Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook.
This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no
inconsiderable success."<br>
<br>
Success was indeed considerable. Moynihan cites reports that within
two months some 60,000 people had been killed, "10 percent of the
population, almost the proportion of casualties experienced by the
Soviet Union during the Second World War." A sign of the success, he
adds, is that within a year "the subject disappeared from the
press." So it did, as the invaders intensified their assault.
Atrocities peaked as Moynihan was writing in 1977-78. Relying on a
new flow of U.S. military equipment, the Indonesian military carried
out a devastating attack against the hundreds of thousands who had
fled to the mountains, driving the survivors to Indonesian control.
It was then that RC Church sources in East Timor sought to make
public the estimates of 200,000 deaths that came to be accepted
years later, after constant denial and ridicule of the
"propagandists for the guerrillas." <br>
<br>
In the propaganda preparation for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, at
the liberal end of the spectrum, Richard Holbrooke stressed “the
very important point” that the population of the eight original
members of New [eastern] Europe is larger than that of Old Europe
[the EU], which proves that France and Germany are “isolated.” So it
does, if we reject the radical left heresy that the public might
have some role in a democracy: the populations were overwhelmingly
opposed to the war, mostly even more so than in those countries
dismissed as Old Europe. <br>
<br>
Holbrooke was an apparatchik for wealth and power, responsible with
others of his generation for millions of deaths, from Southeast Asia
though Indonesia to the Middle East. His interview with the Most
High may have been a good deal more difficult than that with the
Foreign Service officers in his youth. --CGE<br>
<br>
<br>
On 12/14/10 6:18 PM, David Green wrote:<br>
<span style="white-space: pre;">> <br>
> Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on
Wall<br>
> Street. In the early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a
Washington<br>
> consulting firm, Public Strategies, which was later sold to
Lehman<br>
> Brothers<br>
>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/lehman_brothers_holdings_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org"><http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/lehman_brothers_holdings_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org></a>.<br>
> At various times he was a managing director of Lehman
Brothers, vice<br>
> chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the
American<br>
> International Group.<br>
</span><br>
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