Former Ambassador Returns Home to Little Compton to Share Stories of Diplomacy [VIDEO]

A diplomat who has served under six U.S. presidents, three as an ambassador, touched down on his childhood hometown of Little Compton on Wednesday night. Over 100 people came out to to hear Christopher Hill, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, give over an hour of his perspective on diplomacy in the Middle East, as well as other current foreign and domestic issues.

Rev. Peter Tierney said it was not Hill’s first time coming back to talk at his childhood church, a place where his father was a longtime member of the parish and even made the cross that hangs at the altar today.

Hill, in his late 50s, said he is approaching the 50^th year he came to Little Compton. As a child Hill spent most of his time traveling with his father, a U.S. diplomat in the Foreign Service. It wasn’t until diplomats were expelled from Haiti that Hill’s family came stateside and moved to Little Compton. He was educated at Moses Brown School in Providence.

Hill admitted it was nice to be back.  

He talked about the approaching 10^th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and how America’s foreign policy has been conflated by two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Americans looked at this moment and said, ‘we have to react,’” Hill said. “The U.S. took it upon itself to right the world’s problems. In this case, we may have overreacted.”

He said Iraq was viewed by Americans as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship, although it took the general public several years to know the breakdown of the Sunni and Shia denominations.

“This is not a good thing when you’re going to invade a country,” Hill noted.

Creating a democratic society in Iraq is probably better than the alternative forms of governance in that region, and it could serve as a model, Hill said, noting that it is about having a majority vote and having respect for the minority party.

He criticized America for using the same “playbook” on handling Afghanistan as it did Iraq.

“It’s a very different dynamic,” Hill said. “In Afghanistan, I don’t think there’s enough luck in the world to solve their problems. You’ve got to look at their local politics and cut deals and that’s what we’re doing today.”

However, American-imposed politics cannot trump 1,000 years of culture, Hill said, adding that we need to be withdrawing our troops. He also said that one of the toughest problems today in the Middle East is keeping children publicly educated so they do not turn to religious radicalization.

Little Compton resident Anne Keigher, who said she was living in Kuwait with her husband in the 1980s when Iran invaded Iraq, said it was "very enlightening" to have Hill come back to town and share his story.

"He is a true U.S. diplomat," she said.

Domestically, Hill said he’s concerned that the U.S. is able enough to step up to its own challenges. He touched upon the continued rise in unemployment and no new jobs, as well as the budget debacle in Washington and the need to increase the country’s debt ceiling.

Hill added that America has to have a successful relationship with China, and together, harness their efforts for “robust humanitarian efforts” on the global poverty scale, particularly in Africa.

Hill is currently the dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Hill said most of the feedback he hears from students is focused on jobs.

“They want to talk to people who have jobs and help in preserving those jobs,” he said.