By Patricia H. Kushlis

Update: 7/12/2013 - Toria grilled about Benghazi role at Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing today for her next high level position: Assistant Secretary of State for Europe.



Is Hillary asleep at the switch? What is going on here?

Earlier this week, Josh Rogin at FP and Eric Martin at Progressive Realist both flagged the curious appointment of Victoria Nuland as the next State Department Spokesperson to fill P.J. Crowley’s shoes.

Martin questions whether this has foreign policy implications, in particular the replacement of an anti-torture appointee with someone who served as Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Cheney.

Rogin doesn’t directly raise potential administration policy shifts but does point out that once upon a time Nuland was Strobe Talbott’s Chief of Staff when he was Deputy Secretary of State during the Clinton Administration and that Talbott had thought very highly of her at the time and still does. In fact, he, according to Rogin, praised her to the hilt in an interview about the pending appointment. So the seemingly amoral Nuland, we’re led to believe, can and will do anyone’s bidding and do it well – in short, a consummate career diplomat.

Why?

But why would Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration agree to appoint to this politically sensitive position someone who willingly served such a controversial figure in suppporting and implementing the “war on terror” and all the baggage that comes with it? Furthermore, how reliable is a Talbott reference anyway? After all, I understand that he just helped his friend Robert Kagan, Nuland’s neocon husband, get a job at Brookings and Talbott is also a friend of neocon writer Marc Gerecht, the husband of Diane Zeleny who also just latched onto a likely sweetheart deal sort of appointment as Head of External Relations and Congressional Affairs at the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). Whether Zeleny deserves or is qualified for the position or not.

From what I know about the Department, an FSO doesn’t just get detailed to the staff of a highly charged and ideological Vice President unless that detailee agrees to follow the boss’s dictates. Cheney’s were all too often forceful and odious. Furthermore, does anyone really think that Cheney –with his penchant for super loyalty and secrecy - would have ever accepted Nuland (or anyone else) for the position without some kind of loyalty test?

Surely the State Department under Hillary Clinton could have found equally (or likely even better) qualified career candidates who do not carry Nuland’s political baggage.

Behind the scenes trade off?

Or was this some kind of behind the scenes deal – a trade off for who knows what - that those of us innocents outside the inner circles are not privy?

Regardless, there are several particularly unique – or just plain peculiar – unsettling things about this appointment depending upon the way one looks at it:

First, Nuland comes from what has turned out to be an under-the-radar-non-job as a Special Envoy to the moribund multilateral Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Talks. This position is nowhere equivalent in stature to that of Ambassador to NATO a prestigious and high profile position she held under W and Rice after leaving Cheney’s office.

Since she’s been Special Envoy, the CFE Talks seem to have gone exactly nowhere. They were supposed to have ended some time ago and morphed into new talks about European troop levels and numbers of non-nuclear weapons. But it doesn’t look as if that has happened either.

Such a Special Envoy position does not appear to have required Senate confirmation. Certainly I could find no evidence it did. Basically it even sounds like a demotion of sorts – not another rung up on the hierarchical ladder to State’s stratosphere.