In memory of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, I present his address to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs conference on "Israel's Right to Secure Boundaries" on June 4, 2007:

http://www.jcpa.org/text/resolution242-holbrooke.pdf

That there is no British voice among these tells me Mr Holbrooke was indeed one of the greatest American diplomats ever; someone who brought peace to the Balkans, the source of the First World War; someone who probably saved more Muslims in one life time than all the Jihadists have killed around the world. He was the embodiment of what is good about American foreign policy after you cut through the propaganda which has been perfected in Europe over the last half century.

America and the world will miss him. He was one of a kind and will always be so, unfortunately for the world.

I have to laugh at the overwrought funeral odes being offered by the great and the good for "the greatest diplomat of his generation", etc, etc. What nonsense. Holbrooke was a great self-promoter, that's true. The reality is much more mixed.

In Afghanistan, Holbrooke thought he could just start screaming and Karzai would fall into line. But of course, this wasn't merely a case of bombing Serbia into submission. In South Asia, he had the much more difficult problem of getting a nominal ally, for whom we had--and have--no obvious substitute to agree to a strategy he finds unsatisfactory. Holbrooke definitively failed in that task.

As Kelly Vlahos observed, "Holbrooke’s experience in Bosnia gave him a false sense of what such interventions could accomplish, and a false sense of himself, just like what happened in Iraq in 2007-2008 during the Surge, which gave Petraeus & Company a false sense of what COIN could accomplish. That Holbrooke is failing to live up to the image of "one of the most talented diplomats of his generation" shouldn’t matter much, but it should serve as yet another warning about the disappointments still ahead."

Holbrooke's support for the murderous suppression of East Timorese when he was Asst SECSTATE for Asia/Pacific in the Carter Administration is one of his earlier and less well known follies.

His ignominious role in create of the narco-state called Kosovo also deserves to be recalled. Just this week, the Guardian reported that a Council of Europe inquiry found that, “Kosovo’s prime minister is the head of a “mafia-like” Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe."

The establishment of the Kosovar state was of course preceded by the ethnic cleansing of its Serbs after the use of the false pretext of Serb "genocide" against the Kosovars. Holbrooke was quite content to use this charade to create a proxy state in Kosovo which is now an embarrassment to Europe.

Yet, we have all the king's horses and all the king's men at FP trying to set Holbrook up on a pedestal to be revered by all right-thinking sycophants of our hegemony-loving establishment. Pathetic.