Hill confirmations hearings.

This Committee will hold many hearings this year, but few more important than this week’s confirmation hearings for Ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan. 143,000 American military personnel remain in harm’s way in Iraq and about 40,000 more are in Afghanistan. The outcomes of these wars will have profoundly important consequences for our nation. And diplomacy will be crucial to determining these outcomes.

We begin today with Iraq. In Ambassador Christopher Hill, President Obama has chosen an extraordinarily talented Foreign Service professional with a long and distinguished record of service to be Ambassador to Iraq.

Often, the reward for diplomats who succeed in difficult postings with long odds is tougher assignments with longer odds. Ambassador Hill has made a career, now entering its fourth decade, of tackling seemingly intractable diplomatic challenges.

And make no mistake: Iraq today still presents extraordinary challenges. While we have set a timetable for withdrawing our troops, as many of us have long advocated, our work there is far from finished. The days when we could hope to impose solutions in Iraq are long past. It is the Iraqis who will ultimately determine their own future. Our task is to leverage our troops’ redeployment into a sustainable political accommodation that prevents Iraq from sliding back into widespread ethnic or sectarian violence. To succeed, we will need to address Iraq’s potentially volatile internal conflicts and complex regional dynamics through a series of overlapping diplomatic and political initiatives involving a multitude of actors.

Fortunately, Ambassador Hill brings particular talents and experience well-suited to this mission. In addition to serving as Ambassador to Macedonia, Poland and South Korea, he was also Special Envoy to Kosovo in 1999 and one of the top negotiators of the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia—both of which gave him crucial experience solving the complex problems of ethnic civil wars. And as we all know, as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Special Envoy to the Six Party Talks, he had to coordinate delicate multilateral negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear program while dealing directly with an extremely difficult regime in Pyongyang.

he drawdown of U.S. troops will be “combined with a political diplomatic and civilian effort … to lay the foundation for lasting peace and prosperity.” The objective is “normalizing our relations with Iraq” for a “broad-based” relationship, addressing “the plight of refugees and internally displaced people.” He analogizes it, subtly, to his efforts in Kosovo and North Korea. He runs down the list of generals he’s worked with as a way of insulating himself from the charge, made by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsay Graham (R-N.C.), that he doesn’t understand the military.

Priorities: “providing Iraqi government with support it needs for parliamentary elections”; deepening respect for human rights; “helping them strengthen the rule of law”; sustained economic development. He wants to work with Iraq’s neighbors to stabilize the region.

“One of the finest embassy staffs ever put together … diplomacy is a team sport.” This is a subtle way of saying he’ll rely on the experts in the Baghdad embassy to supplement his lack of familiarity with Iraq. “The most important preparation for these overseas assignments” is “a sense of humility and determination.”

In response to questions from Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), he says his tenure as special envoy for Kosovo during the 1999 NATO war made sectarian challenges “very familiar issues” to him. “You’ve got to deal with them on a very local level,” he said. “You’ve got to try to put yourself in the shoes of these communities and try to be helpful.” Spoken like a counterinsurgent.