-
The Cable
Rand Paul: You’re Arming al Qaeda’s Allies
-
War of Ideas
No, 3-D Printing Won’t End Hunger
-
Passport
Why Does the U.S. Get All the Tornadoes?
Posted By Josh Rogin
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 - 5:26 PM
Share
Former President Jimmy Carter and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari were hoping to visit the State Department this week to brief officials on their recent trip to North Korea, but nobody at the State Department was available to meet with them.
Carter and Ahtisaari, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates, had been eager to give their readout of their meetings in North Korea April 26 and 27 to U.S. officials and press their case for a resumption of food aid to the Hermit Kingdom. The two are members of the Elders, a group of senior figures who have been informally engaging with regimes that official governments won't deal with, in the hopes of finding pathways to peace. They traveled to North Korea last month with former Irish President Mary Robinson and former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Bruntland. Other members of the Elders include Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi.
But no one at the State Department would meet with them, so the trip to Washington was cancelled.
"The trip was arranged at short notice and due to busy schedules and given everything else going on we were not able to arrange meetings at the right level," a spokesman for the Elders told The Cable. The State Department offered no comment on the situation.
The Chinese, however, had time for the Elders. They spent two days in Beijing April 24 and 25 and had dinner with foreign minister Yang Jiechi. Neither the North Korea nor South Korea leaders met with them, but they did get meetings with high level officials in both countries. Ahtisaari and Brundtland also had meetings in Brussels last week with President of the EU Herman Van Rompuy and several other EU officials.
But while the State Department might be too busy to hear from the Elders, your humble Cable guy has a bit more free time. Before the cancellation, The Cable had an exclusive interview with Ahtisaari, who at that time was very excited to brief State Department officials on his first visit to North Korea. He even held out hope for a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Ahtisaari called on the international community and the Obama administration to resume food aid to North Korea and to delink humanitarian assistance from political negotiations. He said the World Food Programme had better monitoring capabilities than before, better access, and there was less chance the DPRK would divert food aid to feed its military
He also called for the beginning of a political dialogue with the DPRK on all outstanding issues and said that the North Koreans were interested in both bilateral talks and discussing a return to the Six Party Talks on its nuclear program. Ahtisaari also said the Elders were told that Kim Jong Il was prepared to join a summit meeting with his south Korean counterpart, Lee Myong Bak.
"I'm not asking anyone to believe every word that the North says, but we have to take seriously when they say they are prepared to talk," Ahtisaari said. "How do you expect your present policy of not talking to solve any of the issues you presumably you want to be solved. I don't have any other answers but to sit and talk."
It's no secret at all that the Elders' trip to North Korea was viewed as extremely unhelpful by the governments both in Washington and Seoul. Chris Nelson reported on April 29 that Clinton reacted strongly when asked in a morning meeting if she wanted to meet with Carter. From the Nelson report:
The performance of President Carter and his delegation in N. Korea this week was either shameful or fatuous...or both...and exemplifies why Carter had no...zero...USG support going in, and even less coming out, per an alleged eye witness account of Sec. St. Clinton at the morning meeting the other day:
"Do you want to meet with Carter?" Clinton is looking at papers, and just says "No." Then she pauses, looks up and adds, "HELL no!!!"
Besides going to North Korea without any administration support, Carter alienated Washington's policy community when he declared at a Seoul press conference on April 28 that "to deliberately withhold food aid to the North Korean people because of political or military issues not related is really indeed a human rights violation."
Former NSC Senior Director for Asia Victor Cha just happened to be in Seoul that day, staying in the same hotel as the Elders, and said that people in South Korea were very upset at Carter's remark.
"People who work on the food issue with North Korea know the very real problems of diversion to the military, and Carter's statement implied that China -- because it gives food unconditionally to North Korea -- is more of a human rights upholder in North Korea than the others, which was not well-received," Cha told The Cable.
Ahtisaari wouldn't say that he agreed with Carter's statement, but tried to explain the context.
"What he simply wanted to do was to make a dramatic appeal to everybody, because we have seen due to the political constraints there has been unwillingness to assist the North in a humanitarian way," he said. "It's totally unacceptable to mix politics with humanitarian assistance."
Ahtisaari criticized the Obama administration's policy of "strategic patience," which basically amounts to focusing on ties with allies and not engaging North Korea until the regime admits guilt for recent violent attacks against the South and recommits to its promise to denuclearize.
"Your approach is not terribly trustworthy either, because if the other side says they are willing to discuss all outstanding issues, I say ‘let's test them.' The process has to start; this situation of simply talking past each other doesn't mean anything," Ahtisaari said.
"I have seen worse conflicts than this one, so start talking."
Meanwhile, there are reports that Ambassador Robert King, the special envoy for North Korean Human Rights, would visit North Korea next week, but at Tuesday's State Department briefing, spokesman Mark Toner said no decision had yet been made. Toner also said Ambassador Stephen Bosworth was in South Korea now discussing the food aid situation.
"Our position on food aid is entirely separate from any political decision we may make or any policy decision we may make vis-a-vis North Korea," Toner said. "Our food assistance program... is based on a credible, apolitical assessment of the needs and also autonomy over how that food assistance is delivered."
AFP/Getty Images
EXPLORE:EAST ASIA, DIPLOMACY, NORTH KOREA, NUKES, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, STATE DEPARTMENT, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY 
Another sophisticated move by Foggy Bottom.
Peter wemeantwell.com
They call themselves "The Elders"?
"The Commies" would be a more apt description.
OTBROS
you said it before I could sounds liek an assembly of the biggest marxists in the world, Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela lead by the idiot carter.
Plus there is bad blood b/w carter& the clintons. I remember shortly after obama got in office he invited the surviving Presidents (bush sr & jr Clinton & peanuts) to the WH (1/8/2009). carter is standing away from the group who are together & peanuts has a scowl on his face. the man WAS the worst president this country ever had
http://denverpost.slideshowpro.com/albums/001/496/album-84965/cache/OBAMA_PRESIDENTS_2.sJPG_950_2000_0_75_0_50_50.sJPG?1304498335
Self appointed meddlers who ignore protocol - muddy the waters - don't actually contribute much to the non-conversation....and in the case of Jimmy Carter an endless mission of self-grandisment.
So the Chinese were happy to talk with Jimmy? They have always had a penchant for useful idiots. But I always liked Mr. Carter from Plains Georgia. It was his brother in the White House that I found disturbing.
Hillary did something right!
Quite the contrary. I would interpret Hillary's rude retort to be that of someone who knows she is trapped into doing stupid things. If she felt secure she would be able to be polite. Jonathan Alter did a story on Hillary recently in Vanity Fair and the impression it conveys is that of a woman with no principles and no vision, who runs about the world being frenetically "busy" as a substitute for policy. The reduction ad absurdum of pragmatism. One can see it in her hypocritical stances on Arab liberation, now blowing hot, then cold, then uncertain, in general confused. A sorry excuse for a Secretary of State.
Did anyone ever figure out how the Rose Law Firm's billing records wound up in Hillary's office at the White House. As I recall she said "I don't recall" when someone asked her about it.
Not surprised; Hillary's husband was rather miffed when Jimmy stuck his nose into the NK mess back during his administration too.
Jimmy is just continuing his campaign to be named our nation's worst ex-president. Gotta give him credit; he has run a strong race so far.
State Department Snubs The Elders
Except for Nelson Mandela, just looking at the names involved in this group tells us that this is definately a group from which to stay away. I rarely applaud Hillary's actions, or those of the State Department for that matter, but they certainly made the right decision this time.
What a group of washed-up, philosophically fouled-up bunch of people. They should all just retire somewhere far away and shut up. As a group, especially Jimmy Carter and Desmund Tutu, they are truly useful idiots--useful to the dictators and tyrants of the world. As for Kofi Annan--well, we might well have heard more about him some years ago if Paul Volker and his "investigation," along with many establishment members of the American foreign policy establishment had not protected Kofi.
Well, at least time is working against Jimmy and the rest.
Koffi Annan wants to give out food
I thought Koffi got all the food he needed for the rest of his life when he skimmed off the top from the "Oil for Food" program he administered in Iraq!
Follow this and other top breaking news feeds on http://www.CPSWIRE.com
I have to laugh at all the neocon comments. Of course it was the neocons who enabled the mass murder of over a million Iraqis as well as the destruction of Iraq on behalf of Israel. It was Mandela who called Bush the most dangerous terrorist on the earth when he invaded Iraq. Tutu followed suit. Carter brought about peace between Israel and Egypt, was fiscally responsible and encouraged diplomacy and peace and not invading any country at whim
(all anathema to the neocons). Obama and Clinton ignored the Gaza and flotilla massacres. For all these reasons, Carter has been demonised just like the neocons demonise Ahmadinejad, another peacemaker who unlike israel and the US, has never invaded another country unilaterally for over 300 years.
The neocon legacy will also be the destruction of America, currently well underway. History will regard Carter with his head high. He is a true Christian.
Another lefty site pest learns a new word, neocon, and proceeds to show their basic lack of intelligence. JC is not a Christian, or is it now OK in the Christian world to promote and openly campaign for abortion and the slaughter of innocent babies???
Like the best president since Lincoln, RR says, "It's not that liberals are stupid, it's just that they know so much that isn't true."
Carter is the icon of the Christian Left..... He has never met
an authoritarian regime he didn't like... {a lot} !!
He is a very useful idiot....who is knowingly "complicit" in the Christian Left's
suicide pact with socialism/authoritarians everywhere.
Sorry...You and all the great unwashed are expendable in their matrix
the real reason libs use "neocon"
The libs seem to have dug up the anti-semetic rhetorical garbage of old, copied it into notepad on their PCs, and did a find/replace operation, replacing the word "Jew" with "Neocon." Go ahead, change the words back in their comments on your own computer... it's like reading the writings of Adolf Hitler himself!
Carter is a communist. He did great damage to this country. You are clearly ignorant of his actual history. I do like how you use the broad and mindless "neocons" label to slander everyone you disagree with. Lazy, baseless, dishonest...you are the model leftist. Next time you are feeling the need to publish the reality you fabricate for yourself alone I suggest you do it at MoveOn or the Daily Kos. There you will find other intellectually inconsistent and morally weak libs to fantasize with.
No way is your name Geraldo. It must be Hussein, Khalid or the like. Only a paid troll for Iran would say that Ahmadinejad was a peacemaker.
Fact: The world sat back and watched as Sadam used WMD's (GAS) on his own people, killing thousands. After IRAQ invaded Kuwait, the UN backed ouster put dozens of UN mandates on IRAQ Non of these were followed. 12 years later, the US was still technically at war with IRAQ and with the biggest coalition in history invaded IRAQ for regime change. President George W. Bush had the integrity to carry this though. Thank you President Bush.
Fact: The US during the Carter administration was miserable. Home loans peaked at 20%. Gasoline was rationed by even or odd license plate numbers. Odd one day, even the next. Inflation was skyrocketing. Carter told everyone to wear a sweater indoors to keep warm.
Great liberal policy.
History won't be kind to your hero Carter.
This guy is the poster boy for the "Useful Idiot". As more time goes by he repeatedly reminds us of why he was four-and-out, and arguably the worst ever to hold the office.
Carter acts play the well-meaning guy who never gets the big picture. When the source of the humanitarian crisis is political in nature, you don't support the political beast who is causing the problem by feeding their people for them. In affect, you would be supporting the offending regime. I don't at all like the situation in NK. I would like nothing more than to sweep in and free North Koreans from their masters. But to feed them FOR their masters will do nothing but strengthen those masters and their grip on the people they enslave.
And another thing, Carter COULD set up a food bank for NK and try to do things his own way instead of just yacking about what should be done. But no, not this guy. "The government has to do it, " to which I reply, "Whatever." His feeble pleas will continue to go unanswered while he sits around doing nothing of any real value. DO something man. Start a charity!
Carter is high on compassion, low on big picture vision.
Why should anyone waste a moment of time on this silly old twit and his finnished sidekick?
Aung San Suu Kyi is a member of these self appointed "Elders"? Is this a joke? I don't think she is meeting with the leaders of any pariah regimes other than the one that is holding her captive. This is cynical symbolism at its worst.
The guiding principles of this group of political hacks
SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL. SMELL NO EVIL
Ignoring this newsspeak group.... is a step in the right direction.
..unfortunately
Hillary .....was just busy that day!!!...
I thought Hillary's response about meeting with Carter was GREAT!
Jimmy Carter was the second or third worst president in the history of the U.S.
UNBELIEVABLE that he would have American taxpayers send food to the "Dear Leader".
One would have to be a moron to believe this will go to the people of N. Korea and not to fatten up his troops.
Carter's brain has always been controlled with emotion void of logic.
How many times can N. Korea make jimmy look like a total fool in 1 lifetime?
These clowns have just as much a right to represent the United States to a foreign country and then demand a meeting with the State Department as I do. I was not elected nor legally appointed by an elected official either! It's obvious that Mr. Carter does not quite understand the true implications of the election of 1980 and that misjudgment should cost him his passport.
Let him have the passport, just revoke it while he is gone. LOL
PLEASE
somebody close to Jimmy, tell him to shut up and sit down, It is a good thing that being as dumb as a rock is not illegal n this country, Jimmy would have been sent to the chair for he crimes against this country and humanity
I don't think he can be a bigger fool clown, if he was in the center ring of the biggest show on earth.
GO home you old fool
"Carter and Ahtisaari, both Nobel Peace Prize laureates..."
They gave Carter a Nobel Prize just to show they didn't like Bush. Is that supposed to impress anyone? Al Gore got a Nobel Peace Prize for peddling his global warming schtick. Yassir Arafat got a Nobel Peace Prize for pretending not to want to blow up Jews for a few days. Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for... well, nobody really knows what he got his for.
The Nobel Peace Prize is nothing more than a liberal popularity award, and hasn't had anything to do with actual peace for years.
Jonathon Alter doesn't like Hillary? He was fired last month
and is still looking for a job. Hillary is right, for once, to keep this silly little half-wit from wasting her time with the lies that the NorKs stuffed into his empty head.
The so-called "elders" along with JC are a bunch of busybodies meddling in areas and over their heads---way over their heads and being used as pawns.
Some of these old fools just don't know when it's time to leave the limelight to someone else.
Ronald Reagan was the wisest POTUS since Abraham Lincoln and memorably said the "liberals aren't stupid, but they know too many things that just ain't so."
[Sorry for the slight correction, LARGONAMVET...!]
Ben Franklin probably had Jimmy Carter in mind when he said "There's no fool like an old fool."
Back in 1995, I had lunch with Norwegian Socialist Prime Minister Gro Harlem Gruntland, pictured above, and was told then that she was one of five people on the Nobel Peace Prize Committee who considered the nominations and voted for the final choice.
The woman confined her conversation to a few grunts [hence the name?] and she was barely intelligible during the lunch at the Hilton in Chicago, where I was a senior exec at Amoco Corp, and now I finally realize how third-raters like Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barack Obama and other left-wing half-wits get the Nobel Peace Prize. I have learned since then that most of the Peace Prize Committee is composed of Norwegian women....should be an indicator why not many people find the recent Peace Prize winners even appropriate---especially an Obama who was in his first year of his presidency.
I suppose having been an exec at Amoco doesn't exclude you from being an obvious ideologue spouting the different side of the same coin.
It's comical that Carter goes all over the world and thinks that anyone cares what he says or does, we didn't when he was President and we don't care NOW!! The guy was an idiot 35 years ago and obviously still IS!!!
Jimmy has problems with international relations; if he were a Republican the difficulty would be blamed on his redneck accent, but as a Democrat I guess you just have to blame him.
BTW, I gather the Elders are self-appointed, who pays the expenses?
Jimmy Carter is, was and will continue to be an incompetent. He is another egotistical nitwit like Al Gore. Why don't they go quietly into the sunset?
A Conservative who at times likes Hillary
LOL: "Hell No!!" to Carter!!. This is one of those times ya gotts love Hillary.
Hilly, baby why are you not a Conservative? Give up that Progressive/Lib-crap and become a real American
Than you would be a hell of a President!!
Carter is so irrelevant. At least Ted Kennedy had the decency to die.
Amazing, The dems, finally realize what sane Americans learned about peanut brain 2 years into his Presidency, and it's front page news around the globe. Sadly, at this rate, I'll be long dead before they admit they've put another leftist bonehead in the White House. But that, too, will come.
The Elders are a bunch of corrupt leftist parasites
Leaving out Desmond Tutu and Ella Bhatt, both of whom can conceivably be called true humanitarians, and Fernando H. Cardoso who laid the foundations for a prospering Brazil with his just right of center economic policies as Brazillian President, the rest of these idiots are failed rogues gallery of wanna be global aristocrats and elitists.
Martti Ahtisaari is a leftwing Finnish politician and UN careerist who allowed over 300 UN staffers to escape fraud convictions. Lakhdar Brahini is a left wing Arab Nationalist and another UN careerist. Grac Machel is a leftist, power seeking woman who has a penchant for marrying Presidents having been First Lady of both Mozambique and South Africa and also a UN careerist. Mary Robinson is a former leftwing President of Ireland who's trying to promote herself to the global aristocracy by serving in the UN and becoming a member of the Elders cabal. Gro Bruntland is a Norweigian leftwing politician who has also looked to promote himself to the global elite through the UN.
And Khofi Annan, well what can you say about the most corrupt Secretary General the UN has ever seen. His entire career has been the UN and as the UN careerist in charge of the operation in Rwanda he sat on his thumbs as 800,000 Rwandans were hacked into little bits with machetes. His term as SG of the UN saw the coverup of the Lubbers sexual harassment report and the biggest fraud ever perpetrated in the Iraq oil for food scandal.
Finally, there's dear old Jimmah, the failed US President who was unceremoniously booted from office over 30 years ago and just won't go away. The man has become more and more of a leftwing nutjob as he sinks deeper and deeper into senility.
Seriously, despite how well-meaning these people think they are, the world would be a better place today if most of them had never lived.
Hardly the people who's advice to take when it comes to running the world today.
John Hudson reports on national security and foreign policy from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, the White House to Embassy Row, for The Cable.
May/June 2013
-
Profile
-
FP Power Map
-
Think Again
Follow us on Twitter | Visit us on Facebook | Follow us on RSS | Subscribe to Foreign Policy
About FP | Meet the Staff | Foreign Editions | Reprint Permissions | Advertising | Writers’ Guidelines | Press Room | Work at FP
Services:Subscription Services | Academic Program | FP Archive | Reprint Permissions | FP Reports and Merchandise | Special Reports | Buy Back Issues
Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | Contact Us
11 DUPONT CIRCLE NW, SUITE 600 | WASHINGTON, DC 20036 | Phone: 202-728-7300 | Fax: 202-728-7342
FOREIGN POLICY is published by the FP Group, a division of The Washington Post Company
All contents ©2013 The Foreign Policy Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
(43)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE