When I watched Talbot on "Charlie Rose" last year, he came across to me as a phony.
Strobe Talbott's foreign policy
Pittsburg Tribune
Sunday, February 15, 2004
WASHINGTON - Often old folksy sayings bring a ring of truth to a situation. This week we have two such sayings: Leopards can't change their spots and pig's ears don't make silk purses. However, to our knowledge, there is nothing to prevent Nelson Strobridge Talbott III, from wanting to be known and distrusted as Strobe Talbott.
Nowadays, Strobe Talbott, 57, pontificates from his new office in the Brookings Institution, where he has been president since July 2002. He was elected to the post unanimously by the board of trustees, whose names read like a blue-blood combination of law, industry and the Democratic Party. Its members include many of the Clinton elite, such as Zoe Baird, Donald McHenry, Vernon Jordan, Larry Summers, James Wolfensohn and, for flavor, Teresa Heinz.
Talbott is one of the elite. The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, Yale, a three-year Rhodes scholarship in England, plus membership in America's No. 1 secret society. Like President Bush, his father and grandfather, like Sen. John Kerry and others from elite business and political families, Talbott is a member of Yale's secret society, the Skull and Bones.
Talbott's career got a jump-start in Moscow when a KGB talent-spotter, Viktor Louis, arranged for this American kid from Ohio to translate and edit the memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev. Talbott became an instant authority on Russia, which, when coupled with his being Bill Clinton's housemate and constant companion in his Oxford days, made him interesting. He became Clinton's architect for American foreign policy and a strange journalist for the next 30 years.
During those years, Talbott wrote books, was a correspondent for Time magazine and rose to become editor-at-large. During the Clinton presidency, he spent eight years at the State Department, seven of them as deputy secretary. To understand Clinton's foreign policies, we only have to read a Talbott piece in Time from 1992, "The Birth of the Global Nation." It says, in part, "Nationhood as we know it will be obsolete: all states will recognize a single global authority. It has taken the events in our wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government."
Contemporary relevance
So, why is Strobe Talbott important in 2004? Because he loves to talk and especially to give interviews. We now come to the man who is an expert, not on Russia, but on Pakistan.
This month, after a two-month investigation, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, 67, known as the brain behind Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, the "Islamic bomb," went on his country's television to confess and apologize. He had for the past 20 years, given and sold nuclear secrets, highly damaging to the United States, to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He said no army general or politician had authorized his efforts and that he was sorry for having done this. He expressed his gratitude to President Pervez Musharraf for the full pardon that he received.
The next day, Talbott was interviewed by Siddharth Varadarajan for "The Times of India." "No one who was involved in the Clinton administration's policies at the time is surprised," he babbled. "We certainly knew about A.Q. Khan's links to North Korea, his trips elsewhere. This was no surprise."
Having admitted to Bill Clinton knowing about this serious threat to America's security, Talbott continued with a lame explanation that they had hoped to use this as leverage to persuade Pakistan to sign a treaty on export controls of nuclear material.
Nothing was done by the Clinton administration to staunch the flow of information from Pakistan to other Islamic states -- as long as they could pay. Deals were done by Pakistan's presidents with Libya, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Proliferation anyone?
Let's look at what Abdul Khan really has done. Over 30 years, he had spent some $10 billion on developing a nuclear arsenal, which possibly serves Syria, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. A great deal of money stuck to Abdul the Greedy's fingers, on the way to the research center named for him in Kahuta, near the capital of Islamabad.
Khan's assets are enormous. He owns a lakeshore home and property in Pakistan, as well as in France, England and Holland. He has houses in Dubai and Iran, where his villa was a gift from the government. Khan built and furnished a luxury hotel in Mali, on a historical caravan route, using the Pakistan Air Force as his personal delivery service.
But, of course, Abdul's nuclear black market routes are known only to a few smugglers. Many now know that much of his financing came from the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) in Dubai, whose scandals involved our very own Democrats from Carter to Clinton, with starring roles taken by Burt Lance, Clark Clifford and Robert Altman.
While many of Khan's supporters in the military and especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) unit are fanatical Muslims, Abdul Khan, a very smart man, was more of a mercenary who knew that Pakistan needed not only a nuclear bomb, but a missile delivery system as well. So Khan went to China. Following Khan's return to Pakistan, work accelerated on the Haft III and Ghauri ICBM.
'Insurance' in the U.K.
Khan gets to keep his money, his hotels and his pardon. Not because President Musharraf wanted to allow him a free pass, but because his daughter, Dina, lives in England with a British husband, a casefull of documents and a video giving the names of Pakistani generals and politicians who were complicit. She also has her father's instructions as to how and when these papers should be released.
According to sources in Islamabad, these papers document the involvement of high-ranking military officers, including General Musharraf and America's "friends" in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. It seems that the only Pakistani politician not to be involved with the Islamic bomb is Benazir Bhutto, who knew nothing until briefed by the CIA when visiting Bill Clinton.
Before Khan made his confession (or took Musharraf off the hook), Talbott was back at his old stand, advising the Russians at the World Economic Forum in Davos on the state of his little world at Brookings.
Now that we have Strobe Talbott back, let's make sure that he never, ever gets near any important information in our government.
Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer. |
