In the best of all worlds everyone in the Embassy is doing something to assist U.S. exports.

it would be a close call in either case.

There is a natural partnership between State and Commerce, and the American business community to work together to educate the United States about marketing overseas.

It’s more than about time

My point here is I think international pressures of our acting unilaterally again are going to be such that the administration will say, well, we just can’t take this on now.

I do not believe that you should have in the secretary of state someone who has spent their last four years in the White House next to the president,

We have to spend a lot more time training people to be good advocates of U.S. business.

Those are two tough issues and they really go to the heart of what that country’s going to be like, … If the new Iraq is going to go into the 21st century at all...

Now there is a cultural change under way in the Foreign Service.

In the end, while I thoroughly understand and totally supported President Bush’s decision not to pursue Saddam personally, I am now prepared to admit that it was probably a mistake.

We must institute more training to give Foreign Service Officers the skills to do what they must do in this new world of commercial competition.

Probably some of them don’t believe it was a mistake, and for those who do … people don’t often like to admit they’re wrong. I’m not even sure I’m right when I say it was...

Small- and medium-sized companies do not know what we have to offer and that needs to be changed. We must react just as strenuously on their behalf as we do for larger companies.

It was Sharon – and Sharon alone – who was driving this thing in the right direction.

What I can’t quite see at this stage is that the evidence, even to the president, seems to be that clear. And if it is that clear, I can’t understand why we are not capable...

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

Some day, somebody is going to have to start talking about what happens to us all a decade from now if we let these North Koreans and the Iranians go forward with their nuclear weapons...

If I was to criticize the administration for anything, … it is the general [opinion people] have in so many places around the world that the United States is so powerful now — and the...

What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad.

I didn’t hear anyone making the argument very strenuously, quite frankly.

That said, there is a tendency to help the large industrial conglomerate more quickly than the small company you have never heard of. That is something in the culture we are trying to change.

I think we have to be careful that it’s clear we’re dealing with him, but not to go so far that if he in fact sinks … we sink along with him,

What we need is to develop in all Foreign Service Officers a better instinct for understanding the needs of U.S. business abroad.

One of the things that was clearly a part of the president’s decision was that all of his generals were telling him it was time to leave,

The Foreign Service has spent 50 years concentrating on political and military affairs at a time when the U.S. economy was preeminent.

When you’re in the presence of the president of the United States … you’re likely to pull your punches to some degree.

And beyond that, the next issue is how do we guarantee one of these weapons, not necessarily this missile, but nuclear weapons ends up in the hands of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group.

The point is, once they have a missile that can hit the United States, we are now back in the kind of game we used to worry about with the Soviet Union, only the Soviet...

How long do we stay? How much does it cost? What does it do to our conditions within that part of the world? What kind of a regime do we put in his place? How...

Any Ambassador or Foreign Service Officer who has his or her head screwed on right knows that the U.S. position in the world is far more dependent on our ability to compete in world markets.

I think, unless Saddam Hussein falls in a hole one day or somebody shoots him in the head, I personally think he is prepared to go down with his ship.

The question really is how do we get Embassy Officers into the minds of the American business community. That is a much more difficult task than understanding a statistical matrix.

I’m not sure very many people have had an opportunity to say anything about it,

I think what he’s – what he believes, and he may be correct, I don’t know, that we have some intelligence information that leads us to know some things about what’s going on in Iraq...

When you are in the presence of the president of the United States, I don’t care if you’ve been a devout Democrat for the last hundred years, you’re likely to pull your punches to some...

The whole nuclear thing is a terrible mess and it’s hard for me to understand why it is that we, the United States, seem to be the only ones that are really particularly concerned about...

There is no question in my mind that if given a chance, Saddam will again try to become the bully on the block in his part of the world.

In a time of constrained resources we will have to shift emphasis. but not necessarily from the traditional Political Officer to the traditional Economic Officer.

There is no question that Saddam has been a pain in the neck ever since,

There has been a major improvement in the way U.S. Ambassadors and the Foreign Service establishment try to assist U.S. business overall.

Milosevic, who in my judgment is a liar and a thief and a scoundrel,