Iraq Ambassador Christopher HIll Designate griled on hill

I caught some of Chris Hill's nomination hearing yesterday on C-Span III.

Hill has been at the forefront of American diplomacy for more than three decades. Now, he’s been nominated by President Barack Obama to tackle one of the U.S.’s biggest foreign policy problems as ambassador to Iraq.
The nod has caused quite a stir in Congress, where some Republican senators are threatening to block his nomination because they say Hill doesn’t have enough experience handling Middle East issues. The senators also question his negotiation efforts with North Korea, saying that he did not focus enough on stemming human rights abuses there.
But Hill’s supporters say he has had an exceptional career and that he’s primed for the challenges in Iraq. Hill launched his career as a Peace Corps volunteer helping create a system of microcredit in Cameroon in the 1970s. He joined the Foreign Service soon after and moved to Eastern Europe, where he witnessed the struggle for political freedom in the 1980s. He helped negotiate an effort to end the Kosovo war in the 1990s and led a praised if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. He speaks Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and Macedonian.
snip
Gen. David Petraeus, top Iraq commander Gen. Raymond Odierno, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates all support Hill’s appointment and have said they are frustrated with the delays. Hill also has the support of the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), and Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).(6) “Hill has built a career untangling seemingly intractable foreign policy challenges. His should not be a controversial nomination,” Kerry wrote in an opinion piece in Politico.com in March 2009.(7)