President Obama joined Vice President Joe Biden and newly confirmed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the State Department this afternoon to stress his commitment to reinvigorating America's diplomatic efforts and to introduce two new emissaries to deal with some of the most pressing foreign policy issues facing his administration -- the Middle East and the region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell has been named Obama's special envoy to the Middle East. As President Clinton's special envoy to Northern Ireland in the 1990s, Mitchell played a central role in the negotiations that resulted in the Good Friday Agreement, an experience which he said today taught him that there is no such thing as a conflict that cannot be ended.
Obama's appointee as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, helped broker the Dayton Peace Accords between warring factions in Bosnia in 1995 and also served as the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. from 1999-2001. Holbrooke said today that, while the U.S. understands that Pakistan is far more than the "turbulent" tribal region on its border with Afghanistan, the two countries are now so closely intertwined that they cannot be dealt with separately from one another.
Both appointees, as well as Obama and Clinton, stressed the difficulty of the challenges facing them, but pledged their best to achieving a lasting peace in the Middle East and a more effective campaign to root out terrorists and extremists along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.
Updated: The Washington Post has the transcript of remarks by Obama, Clinton, Mitchell and Holbrooke.
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