Greetings TWN readers and commenters.

My site has been under attack from a bunch of spammers -- some are posting pretty outrageous material either pro or against Zionism; some is porn; and a lot is commercial. The site was compromised -- and we've had to move all of the files on the site to a new internet service provider.

My colleague, Andrew, has done a great job getting this underway -- but there are inevitable glitches, including some ongoing problems with the captcha system. I've heard from a number of you that there are some problems and I've passed it on to him.

The good news is that I have huge bandwidth capacity now to handle further growth of the site.

Sorry for the hassles during this transition.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff at the Department of State from 2001-2005 and a sixteen-year long aide to General Colin Powell. He now serves as Harriman Adjunct Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary.

South Carolina's Worst

My father was a life-long Republican.

This was not easy for him because my grandmother, a foundation stone of our family, was a life-long Democrat. Both were South Carolinians to their core--my grandmother a first-grade school teacher for half a century, traveling widely, but always most comfortable in her southern home; my father a military man in WWII, later a vice president for Allstate Insurance Company, and still later an Arabian horse and Black Angus cattle rancher, but only after returning to his beloved state of South Carolina.

Thomas Wolfe's admonition about not going home never appealed to my father.

My grandmother died at the Darlington, South Carolina Baptist Home, beloved of those kind and generous people for her more than 70 years of service to her Baptist Church. I miss her greatly even today. My father passed away in December of 2007 after telling the head nurse at his full-care facility, "You people make it too g-d hard to die."

But before my father died, he spoke some profound words about the state of politics in South Carolina.

A few months before he passed, as I was talking with him about serious matters such as my Mom's financial inheritance--she's still living at 89--he turned to me and said: "You know, son, I'm not voting for Lindsey Graham again. He promised to be term-limited and he broke his promise. So, I'm not voting for him again."

That was a hard thing for my father to say, as hard as granite.

As he paused and looked gravely at me, I took the opportunity to ask him: "What about Jim DeMint?"

He fixed me with his steely blue-gray eyes and said: "I'm not voting for him either. He's an idiot."

My father was mistaken but his intent was in the right direction.

Senator DeMint's (R-SC) latest "idiocy" is single-handedly holding up two of President Obama's appointments to State Department duties--Tom Shannon as U.S. Ambassador to the most important country in South America, Brazil, and Arturo Valenzuela to be the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

A single senator's ability to effect such holds is lunacy gone amuck in any regard; but Jim DeMint gives that state of affairs new meaning altogether. He is holding up a refurbishment of U.S. foreign policy in our own hemisphere--and in the name, he says, of a coup d'etat in Honduras, a coup that he apparently supports.

Recently, South Carolina--my home state--has not shown up too well in the harsh kleig lights of today's radical-eat-radical politics. A governor who gallivants off to see his lady friend in Argentina, a congressman who calls the President of the United States a liar from the floor of the House and then raises political money because of it, and a senator who blocks a much-needed re-examination of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America because he supports a coup d'etat that, according to him and not the people of Honduras, brought a better leader to the helm of Honduras.

In defense of his position, Senator DeMint writes in the Wall Street Journal that "America's Founding Fathers--like the framers of Honduras's own constitution--believed strong institutions were necessary to defend freedom and democracy from the ambitions of would-be tyrants and dictators."

I do not believe that the likes of George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin would have included coup d'etats in their listing of "strong institutions."

And, of course, nothing is said in DeMint's article about the real reason for his and other politicians'--including some Democrats--reasoning with regard to Honduras. In their reasoning, AT&T and other U.S. business interests play heavily, perhaps even more heavily than democracy? Likewise for long-standing and nefarious U.S. ties to the Honduran military establishment.

In that latter regard, nothing is said about the reason that President Zelaya, the leader whom the coup d'etat removed from office, may have wanted to change the constitution of Honduras. One clear reason, for example, was to limit the power of the military in that much-troubled state--a military with whose leaders I met some years ago in my capacity as Deputy Director of the US Marine Corps War College, and I can only say that when I departed the room where we met, my greatest urge was for a shower to cleanse myself of the stench that lingered from their presence.

Jim DeMint. Not an idiot as my father claimed--because that would in some way excuse him. And there is no excuse for his actions, the reasons for which are all too apparent.
Ah, South Carolina. Both my beloved grandmother and my father would be as ashamed as I am.

-- Lawrence B. Wilkerson

(photo credit)

This is a guest note by Nancy Soderberg and Francesco Femia.

Nancy Soderberg is a former US Ambassador to the United Nations and President of the Connect U.S. Fund, a consortium of six U.S. foundations promoting key foreign policy goals. Francesco Femia is a Program Officer at the Connect U.S. Fund, where he focuses on climate and development issues.

Confronting the Climate Financial Crisis

There's another financial crisis on the horizon -- the climate financial crisis. Working towards the global meeting in Copenhagen this December, the UN's climate negotiations are teetering on the brink of failure. The elephant in the room of these negotiations is how to pay for a global agreement -- and who will pick up the tab.

If the administration does not get ahead of Congress and commit now to financing a global deal on climate change, negotiations will fail. And the cost of inaction and certain failure will be much higher than the cost of action. Once a tipping point is reached, we will face a human and financial catastrophe that will make this recession seem like a golden age of prosperity. And unlike our economy, once the damage is done, the climate will not rebound with a bailout package.

The challenge boils down to this: the developed world -- responsible for today's crisis -- must help pay the costs for the developing world to do the right thing. Those catching up to us -- China and India -- will have to participate too, but developed countries need to lead. The good news is that for $150 billion, the world can get far ahead of the problem. While the long terms costs are likely to be higher, this investment now will set the world on the right course.

At the September G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, leaders recognized the need to get the financing right by directing their Finance Ministers to report back at the next meeting in November with a range of possible options for climate change financing. They should recommend a global target for climate finance of at least $150 billion annually by 2020 - and commit the United States to funding 30% of that target, or $50 billion, through public financing. Roughly a third of this would be used to help the developing world adapt to the current effects of climate change, another third for helping poor nations adopt clean technologies, and the remainder for other mitigation objectives, such as energy efficiency and forest protection.

To be sure, in the wake of the current financial crisis, such funding will be politically difficult to obtain. Yet, we managed to find $15 trillion for bank bailouts and stimulus plans, $1.3 trillion in tax cuts, and one trillion dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The investment in saving our planet is no less urgent a challenge.

The risks to our national security (pdf) are real, including natural disasters, political upheaval, and further instability in states that could harbor the next Osama Bin Laden. And again, there is some good news. It costs billions, not trillions, and possible sources of public financing already exist, including revenues from the auctioning of allowances under cap-and-trade mechanisms, current climate and energy legislation, bunker fuel mechanisms, and international carbon and currency transaction levies.

But perhaps the most cost-effective way to help the world adopt clean energy and adapt to the effects of climate change is to stop propping up the very industry we should move away from fossil fuels. The world's richest G20 economies spend an estimated $300 billion a year to subsidize the industry most responsible for global emissions. In other words -- we have the money, we're just using it the wrong way. Re-directing this money would generate double the amount needed for climate financing -- and it wouldn't cost us a dime. At the September G20 summit in Pittsburgh, leaders asked for a plan to phase out those subsidies, but they won't consider it until June of 2010.

That is too leisurely a pace.

President Obama should press for a plan to be in place before the Copenhagen meeting this December -- preferably by the end of the G20's Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting on November 6 and 7. In the meantime, he should move to end our own subsidies and instruct the U.S. agencies that currently provide fossil fuel subsidies internationally to do so, including the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the U.S. Export Import Bank, and the Treasury Department which works through the World Bank.

According to the Environmental Law Institute (pdf), this step alone would save us $72 billion, well more than what the United States needs to commit for its fair share of climate financing. Such transfers could break a major deadlock in the negotiations, and bring the developing world on board.

These are all ways to pay for a climate deal now - and at a much lower cost than doing it later. And such a move may be the only way to salvage the faltering Copenhagen negotiations. Should President Obama take the lead, the world will follow. And Congress just might as well.

-- Nancy Soderberg & Francesco Femia

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry is going to give a major speech on Cuba on Friday, the 6th of November, at Boston University.

Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA) -- who has been doing much of the heavy lifting on the Freedom to Travel (to Cuba) bill is also going to be at this important conference.

What has been interesting to watch in Senator Kerry's speeches this past year is a tendency to define challenges more clearly than the White House -- to articulate the costs of inaction or poor focus -- and to assimilate different policy alternatives with a candid discussion of opportunities and costs.

Kerry did this the other day at the Council on Foreign Relations with a respectful critique of the administration's Afghanistan policy. He has done the same on US-China policy and on climate change among other issues.

But why is Senator John Kerry about to give a major speech about Cuba??

Inquiring minds want to know -- and I'm going to call Senate Foreign Relations Committee spokesman Frederick Jones and ask for some direction here.

If John Kerry is planning to simply validate the White House's still too timid openings to Cuba and reinforce the pleas that President Obama and his national security council staff have been making to Raul Castro to engage in domestic reforms before the US can do more -- then that would be out of character for the Foreign Relations Committee Chairman.

My hunch is that Kerry is emerging as a key constructive, respectful truth-teller to the administration, and I hope this holds in US-Cuba relations too.

Conditionality as a requirement of relaxing the embargo has failed for five decades -- and Obama's national security team should know that. NSC Latin America Director Dan Restrepo should know that -- so too Denis McDonough, Ambassador Susan Rice, Tom Donilon and General Jim Jones.

Obama-style people to people engagement would lay the most opportune foundation for the kind of potential reforms the administration hopes to achieve. But continuing to push conditionality is a very good way for the Obama administration to make sure that the lowest hanging fruit in foreign policy opportunities remains hanging on the tree when the Obama team leaves the White House.

I hope that John Kerry encourages great "strategic depth" and thinking in the White House on Latin America in general -- and that he calls for an end to restrictions on the "human right" of Americans to travel.

I still can't believe that a Democratic President -- the first African-American president of the United States -- is content with removing all restrictions on travel for Cuban-American families while discriminating against all other classes of Americans.

That is just one benchmark of the domestic legal perversities that American society acquiesced to because of the Cold War.

The Cold War is over -- and the American government should stop doing what Communist governments do in trying to restrict the travel of its citizens. Americans can go to North Korea, Iran, Vietnam, China, Russia, and just about everywhere else in the world if they can get the visas -- but they may not go to Cuba.

I really don't know what John Kerry is going to say on November 6th -- but I'm counting on something significant.

I am hoping C-Span will cover the speech and that readers in Boston attend the Boston University conference.

-- Steve Clemons

Amidst the debate in Washington surrounding the P5+1 negotiations with Iran over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program, the conventional wisdom is that "engagement" with Iran cannot go on forever. If the Obama administration's talks with Iran don't bear fruit soon, we must "try something else."

But just what is that "something else." The only two tactical suggestions I have come across are either the use of military force to take out Iran's nuclear facilities or "crippling sanctions" that would starve Iran's economy.

The problem is that neither of these "options" is really feasible. A military strike on Iran would have disastrous consequences for the stability of the Middle East and is a recipe for three more decades of antagonistic relations between Washington and Tehran.

Meanwhile, the idea that either the Chinese or the Russians will support "crippling sanctions" against Iran is a delusion.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett sum up the United States' strategic position in their article, "What serious diplomacy looks like -- in Turkey," which appears in today's Politico.

America no longer has the economic and political wherewithal to dictate strategic outcomes in the Middle East. Increasingly, if Washington wants to promote and protect U.S. interests in this critical region, it will have to do so through serious diplomacy -- by respecting evolving balances of power and accommodating the legitimate interests of others so that U.S. interests will be respected.

That means engaging in creative diplomacy and understanding that negotiations will likely be a long and difficult process.

How the Obama administration reacts to Iran's response to the IAEA - which will likely be made public tomorrow - will go a long way toward demonstrating whether it is prepared to exercise the kind of strategic patience necessary to reorient the United States' relationship with Iran and reverse the decline of American influence in the broader region.

-- Ben Katcher

Perhaps no one is better positioned to sift through the complicated and interrelated questions surrounding "peak oil," renewable energy, climate change and energy security, than Cambridge Research Energy Associates Chairman Daniel Yergin.

Yergin won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Pize: The Epic Quest For Oil, Money & Power, published nearly twenty years ago - and has recently written a new epilogue for the book on the current state of the great energy game.

Yergin will be sitting down for a chat on the future of global energy with Steve Clemons today from 12:30pm - 2:00pm at the New America Foundation.

The event will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

My good friend and former Palestine presidential candidate Mustafa Barghouti appeared on The Daily Show tonight.

In addition to trying to generate a new peaceful equilibrium between Israel and Palestine, Barghouti is an occasional guest blogger and commenter at The Washington Note.

He appeared with Anna Balzer who is author of Witness in Palestine: A Jewish American Woman in the Occupied Territories.

-- Steve Clemons

Wow.

The U.S. lost a whopping vote at the United Nations on bringing rationality back to America's Latin America portfolio and finally ending the last refuge of the Cold War.

187 nations voted against the United States. Israel and Palau voted with the U.S. Micronesia and the Marshall Islands abstained.

Looks like America is the isolated party here.

President Obama needs to turn this around.

-- Steve Clemons

Increasing numbers of national security leaders of the likes of Brent Scowcroft and George Shultz have said that the US embargo of Cuba makes no sense and harms American interests.

Republican Congressman Jeff Flake -- the hunky Arizona Congressman who recently spent five days alone on a remote Pacific island -- has reminded Americans that it is COMMUNIST governments that are supposed to get a kick out of restricting the movements of its people -- not DEMOCRATIC governments. Congressman Bill Delahunt has been leading in the House along with Byron Dorgan in the US Senate in calling for an end to all travel restrictions on Americans.

President Obama himself is a believer in people to people exchange -- and that opportunities arise from engagement -- not from isolation.

And yet, the United States today is going to vote in the United Nations against a measure condemning the US embargo of Cuba.

But the United Kingdom, France, Australia, China, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Japan (yes. . .even Japan!!), Poland, Iceland -- about 185 nations give or take a few -- will vote AGAINST THE UNITED STATES position.

Israel and a couple of island nations will vote with the United States. The Israel vote is amusing as Israel votes with the US but turns a blind eye to Israeli firms operating Cuban citrus franchises inside Cuba.

Represenative Jim McGovern (D-MA) has a great suggestion for US Ambassador to the United Nations -- just say "abstain."

Clever idea -- and would signal the possibility of change without going further than the White House incrementalists want to go.

Won't happen -- but darn good idea.

Here is the pdf of McGovern's thoughtful and constructive letter.

The text reads:

23 October 2009

Ambassador Susan E. Rice
U.S. Representative to the United Nations
U.S. Mission to the United Nations
140 East 45th Street
New York, NY 10017

Dear Ambassador Rice:

As you are aware, on Wednesday, October 28th, the United Nations will once again take up the annual resolution calling for an end to the embargo against Cuba. Judging from years past, the UN General Assembly will cast a near unanimous vote in favor of the resolution, with very few members opposing the resolution, including the United States.

I am writing to suggest an alternative: for the United States to abstain.

I do not make this suggestion lightly, but rather to use what has, in general, been a moment to castigate or mock U.S. policy towards Cuba and Latin America as an opportunity to signal that the United States is considering all options in how it will conduct its relations with Cuba in the coming years. Such an action -- and explanation -- would only reinforce the statements already made by the President and the Secretary of State: that the door is open to mutual cooperation, confidence-building, and more. It would also signal to the rest of the hemisphere that the United States has indeed listened to the voices of Latin America, as expressed earlier this year at the Summit of the Americas and at the first general assembly meeting of the Organization of American States (OAS), and is responsive ans sensitive to the concerns raised regarding U.S. policy and posture towards Cuba.

Finally, it would signal to the Cuban government and its people that if they enter into a process of mutual regard and cooperation, the United States is serious about changing its posture over time towards the island.

I realize that even abstaining on this vote is a radical departure from past policy -- but I believe that's exactly what is needed at this current moment in history. We can take advantage of the opportunity provided by this annual debate and vote to underscore and emphasize in concrete terms for the international community the open-minded review of US-Cuba policy that the President and his foreign policy teach are currently undertaking.

I urge the most serious consideration of this suggestion, and I would be happy to discuss it further with you prior to the October 28th vote.

Sincerely,

James P. McGovern
Member of Congress

cc: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State
Thomas A. Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs

-- Steve Clemons

As I reported last night at the J Street Gala Dinner at which former US Senator Chuck Hagel was giving a keynote address, the President has now announced officiall that former Senators Hagel and David Boren will co-chair the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

The announcement follows here:

Tevi Troy has called out three political icons in a Politico essay -- Bill Maher, Farrakhan and Glenn Beck -- for irresponsible commentary about the swine flu virus and public health, and I applaud Troy for doing so.

Tevi Troy, who is now at the Hudson Institute and previously served as both Deputy Domestic Policy Advisor to GW Bush and then served as Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services, supports the seriousness of President Obama's calling the upcoming flu season a national emergency.

Troy writes in Politico:

What do Bill Maher, Louis Farrakhan and Glenn Beck have in common? Usually not much, but this flu season, they have all been irresponsible voices who could potentially constitute a greater public health threat than the H1N1 virus.

As we enter what could be a difficult flu season -- President Barack Obama just declared a national emergency -- we face a number of challenges to our public health infrastructure. Some of these challenges are typical and expected, such as the difficulties of distributing materials across a huge country with more than 300 million people in it or the complexities of producing in a short time frame a new vaccine that is safe and effective.

Others, however, are surprises, such as public skepticism from commentators like Maher regarding both public-safety measures like vaccines to prevent the spread of the illness and messages from public health officials. How elected leaders -- and public commentators themselves -- respond will determine our ability to be successful in facing the challenges of both seasonal and H1N1 influenza, as well as other potential biological events in the future.

He concludes:

As we look to the future, it is time to declare potential bio events a "neutral zone" -- a place beyond politics that should be entered by both parties together.

This approach would be far more likely to grab Americans' attention, as the public knows all too well that on most issues, our politicians are constantly at war. But on public health issues essential to the safety of the American people, we need elected leaders who understand the skepticism of citizens and reach out in a bipartisan way with an intelligent, informative, respectful message that helps turn hard government work on preparation and education into successful execution.

Tevi Troy is sounding a lot like Barack Obama on the public health front -- or better yet, Obama is sounding a lot like Tevi Troy. . .and that's a constructive step towards the kind of neutral zone that is needed in some parts of America's policy establishment.

-- Steve Clemons

Editor's Note: Hat tip to intrepid news hound and TWN reader Daniel Lippman for forwarding Tevi Troy's Politico article.

Tomorrow, the New America Foundation is giving back up support for a large conference in the US Senate organized by the RAND Corporation focused on American policy options toward Afghanistan. I think the event is sold out at this point -- with more than 500 attendees -- but the videos will be posted at a later time here at The Washington Note.

But what do Afghans think about their situation?

The Asia Foundation has just released the results of its 2009 Afghan Public Opinion Poll on the subjects of security, reconstruction, and governance.

The most surprising result that jumped out at me was that 42% of Afghans think the country is moving in the right direction (although 64% thought this in 2004) while 29% thought Afghanistan was going in the wrong direction.

The survey showed that insecurity -- attacks, violence, and terrorism -- were the country's biggest challenges.

This is good resource material for those digging into the way Afghans view their circumstances now.

-- Steve Clemons

General Jim Jones, President Obama's National Security Advisor, addresses J Street's first national conference from Isaac Luria on Vimeo.

National Security Adviser Jim Jones emphasizes the importance of getting beyond the status quo in the Israel-Palestine conflict. He commits that President Obama and his team would participate in J Street's work every year -- which is a strong vote of confidence in this new American Jewish organization.

And his commentary on Iran was constructive -- not full of the kind of implied bullying that we have heard from other senior Obama administration officials -- that does little to move the policy needle on Iran's course.

I was not pleased, however, with Jones' characterization of the Goldstone Report -- but I do applaud Jones' focus on the Israel-Palestine challenge and to a viable two-state solution.

-- Steve Clemons

Senator Chuck Hagel has a great sense of humor, and he loves Halloween.

Two years ago, just before Halloween, Hagel showed up at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing chaired by then Committee Chairman Joe Biden in a "Joe Biden mask" urging those there to vote for him.

According to senior Hagel senate staff alumni, Hagel used to wear a chicken costume at Halloween years ago -- and once dressed up as Colin Powell in a meeting to go see General Powell when he was serving as Secretary of State. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had to personally intervene to get Hagel into the building.

Hagel also wore a John McCain mask at a McCain event -- and did this with Senator Pat Roberts too.

So, I returned the favor last night -- appearing in a Joe Biden mask to introduce Senator Hagel to offer some levity in what was a very important dinner focused on Israel-Palestine issues at J Street's big gala event.

Taylor Marsh loved it. So did Zbignew Brzezinski and House International Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman -- at least that's what they said. The Tablet's Jesse Oxfeld thought it went over like a dead weight.**

Nonetheless, humor helps Washington move forward even when so many policy issues appear gridlocked and hopeless.

It takes political leaders like Hagel who can both be serious and focused -- as well as fun -- on both sides of the political aisle to make Washington a more constructive place.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Just got a note from Jesse Oxfeld who said that whether or not there was a "humor error" at the J Street dinner, his team had a "production error" and that Allison Hoffman actually wrote the piece.

Former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel gave an outstanding speech outlining the imperative of American leadership in the Israel-Palestine dispute at the J Street Annual Conference Gala Dinner last night.

I had the privilege of moderating the discussion and having an exchange about US foreign policy with the Senator who teaches at Georgetown University and now chairs the Atlantic Council of the United States.

During my own remarks, which I offered humorously wearing a "Joe Biden mask" (long story. . .for later), I announced that Chuck Hagel would soon be officially announced as the new chair of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, a post that has recently been held by Stephen Friedman, former NY Federal Reserve Board Governor and national economic adviser to President George W. Bush.

Former US Senator and Oklahoma University President David Boren will serve as co-chair with Hagel of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board.

Previously, Brent Scowcroft, Les Aspin and former House Speaker and US Ambassador to Japan Thomas Foley chaired this intelligence advisory body.

Hagel is also scheduled to meet President Obama today in the White House.

This is a great move. Hagel represents the brand of pragmatic Republican national security decisionmaking that President Obama needs to hear much more from.

-- Steve Clemons

On the 17th of October this year, I interviewed Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in his offices in Damascus, Syria on a wide range of topics. I did the interview as part of a launch effort for a new political blog, The Palestine Note, which is releasing the interview today.

The questions I asked Meshal to reflect on were:

1. How had Meshal's father influenced his course given that his father recently passed away? I linked this discussion of Meshal and his father's vision to Barack Obama's own revelations about his father and his goals in Obama's first powerful memoir, Dreams From My Father.

2. I asked Meshal to articulate his vision for a united Palestine, particularly after the occupation.

3. What would life under a Hamas-led government would look like. What are the views on diversity, heterodoxy, secularism? Some people fear that a Hamas-led government hasn't shown the ability to handle diversity and accept people that are different. What is Meshal's answer to those who think that minority rights will be abused? I discussed concerns about the shuttering of private schools in Gaza, forcing women to wear the hijab, and prohibitions on swimming unless wearing prescribed clothing.

4. What are Hamas' views on the Goldstone Report and whether the criticism of Mahmoud Abbas on his stumbles on Goldstone reflected a willingness by Hamas to abide by international law covenants, particularly about targeting innocent civilians. (I found Meshal's response quite interesting but should have pushed him on the subject of suicide bombers which I was unable to at the time.)

5. Is Khaled Meshal a Palestinian patriot or a Muslim patriot? I asked him to differentiate Hamas from other Islamic fundamentalist and Salafist groups, including al Qaeda.

6. Could Hamas be an active and constructive player in peace negotiations with Israel in a way that does not totally violate Hamas' basic charter?

7. Finally, what advice did Meshal have for President Obama as he approaches the next steps of the Middle East peace challenge?

The "transcript" of the entire exchange -- my full questions and Khaled Meshal's responses appears after the break. . .

Browsing Haaretz this morning, I saw this top of the column story about Israeli settlers muscling Palestinians for harvesting olives from their orchards -- because of the fear that the Palestinians could be gathering intelligence on the settlers.

This is perverse. The settlers should be removed from the site near the Palestinian village and/or arrested for the harassment of the Palestinians.

This kind of behavior is consistent with ethnic cleansing efforts -- which have been going on too long without serious comment. The IDF's role in simply separating both sides rather than punishing the provocations by the settlers -- and actually allowing the Israeli settlers to protest inside the Palestinian village -- is wrongheaded.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Sarah Stephens, Director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas

On October 28th, the United Nations General Assembly is expected to vote on a resolution condemning the United States embargo against Cuba.

If past is prologue, it will pass resoundingly. The General Assembly has adopted similar measures in each of the last seventeen years; in 2008, by a margin of 185-3. But that was a condemnation of an embargo enforced, energetically and unapologetically, by the administration of George W. Bush. The vote this year takes place for the first time on President Obama's watch, and so has special significance.

The Secretary-General has prepared a public report that catalogues what UN members and UN organizations say about the embargo.

This document is a powerful reminder that the U.S. embargo is viewed internationally with great seriousness and in ways that are deeply damaging to U.S. interests and our image overseas.

Lest anyone think this policy is only provocative to nations in the non-aligned world, its opponents include Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Egypt, the European Union, India, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Russia.

They are plain-spoken in their opposition. Australia reminds us it votes "consistently" against the embargo. Brazil says it is the "Cuban people who suffer the most from the blockade." China says the embargo "serves no purpose other than to keep tensions high between two neighboring countries and inflict tremendous hardship and suffering on the people of Cuba, especially women and children." Egypt and India condemn the extra-territorial reach of our sanctions, which Japan says run "counter to the provisions of international law." Mexico calls these measures coercive. Russia "rejects" the embargo. Nations across the planet have enacted laws making it illegal for their companies to comply.

Our policy is especially controversial in our own hemisphere, where the U.S. alone is without diplomatic relations with Cuba, and where forum after forum -- including the Rio Group, the Ibero-American Summit, the Heads of State of Latin America and the Caribbean, and CARICOM -- has rejected the embargo and called for its repeal.

Beyond our diplomatic interests, the report forces us to move beyond the stale, political debate in which the embargo is most often framed (where every problem on the island is blamed on either Cuba's system or U.S. policy) and to confront the significant injuries this policy inflicts on ordinary Cubans.

It reminds us:

• The embargo stops Cuba from obtaining diagnostic equipment or replacement parts for equipment used in the detection of breast, colon, and prostate cancer.
• The embargo stops Cuba from obtaining patented materials that are needed for pediatric cardiac surgery and the diagnosis of pediatric illnesses.
• The embargo prevents Cuba from purchasing antiretroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV-AIDS from U.S. sources of the medication.
• The embargo stops Cuba from obtaining needed supplies for the diagnosis of Downs' Syndrome.
• Under the embargo, Cuba cannot buy construction materials from the nearby U.S. market to assist in its hurricane recovery.
• While food sales are legal, regulatory impediments drive up the costs of commodities that Cuba wants to buy from U.S. suppliers, and forces them in many cases to turn to other more expensive and distant sources of nutrition for their people.
• Because our market is closed to their goods, Cuba cannot sell products like coffee, honey, tobacco, live lobsters and other items that would provide jobs and opportunities for average Cubans.

This list, abbreviated for space, is actually much longer, more vivid and troubling, as the report documents case after case of how our embargo affects daily life in Cuba. And for what reason? Because it will someday force the Cuban government to dismantle its system? As a bargaining chip? These arguments have proven false and futile over the decades and what the UN has been trying to tell us since 1992 is that they should be abandoned along with a policy that has so outlived its usefulness.

And yet, it is now the Obama administration supporting and enforcing the embargo -- still following Bush-era rules that thwart U.S. agriculture sales; still levying stiff penalties for violations of the regulations; still stopping prominent Cubans from visiting the United States; still refusing to use its executive authority to allow American artists, the faith community, academics, and other proponents of engagement and exchange to visit Cuba as representatives of our country and its ideals.

To his credit, President Obama has taken some useful steps to change U.S. policy toward Cuba. He repealed the cruel Bush administration rules on family travel that divided Cuban families. He joined efforts by the OAS to lift Cuba's suspension from that organization. He has opened a direct channel of negotiations with Cuba's government on matters that include migration, resuming direct mail service, and relaxing the restrictions that Cuban and U.S. diplomats face in doing their jobs in each of our nation's capitals.

This is a start, but more -- much more -- needs to be done. Not because the UN says so, but because our country needs to embrace the world not as we found it in 1959 -- or in 2008 -- but as it exists today.

President Obama can do this. Our times demand that he do so.

-- Sarah Stephens

I am really enjoying journalist Kati Marton's new book -- an expose on her own family -- titled Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America.

The book is a poignant red flag for what people, seemingly decent citizens, can do to each other in a paranoid national security state. Marton was writing about her family's travails in Hungary -- but the book could be about a future, even a present, America.

I enjoyed this conversation with Kati Marton, who is a board member of the New America Foundation -- and despite that affiliation, I feel quite unbiased about recommending the book highly.

And for another perspective on the book, read Jonathan Yardley's superb review.

-- Steve Clemons

I am really enjoying journalist Kati Marton's new book -- an expose on her own family -- titled Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America.

The book is a poignant red flag for what people, seemingly decent citizens, can do to each other in a paranoid national security state. Marton was writing about her family's travails in Hungary -- but the book could be about a future, even a present, America.

I enjoyed this conversation with Kati Marton, who is a board member of the New America Foundation -- and despite that affiliation, I recommend the book highly.

-- Steve Clemons

In contrast to a number of progressives I know, I was generally supportive of and applauded the early stripes of foreign policy realism that former Massachusetts Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney displayed during the beginning of his campaign.

Romney had a first rate national security advisor in former State Department Policy Planning Director Mitchell Reiss and had others I respect like Nixon Center President Dimitri Simes on his formal advising team.

And then Romney said that America not only didn't need to shut down Guantanamo but needed yet another Guantanamo detention facility. He lost me there with that gratuitous flick and other flippancies he uttered that seemed to compete with how much fear he could stir up in the audiences he was speaking to.

Romney, who is a likely candidate for the GOP presidential race in 2012, is again out pumping up fear. I just received this request for funds to the GOP this morning in which he starts out with an empathetic comment towards Israelis living in fear -- and then paints the Iran government as completely fanatical. This is not realism -- nor even sensible on any level. Iran may have radicals -- very true -- but the country as a whole is shrewdly run to maximize its interests.

We need to understand that Iran is calculating that the US is weak, disorganized and unserious about our objectives. To counter Iran's course, we need to respond to the way in which the regime is reading the mixed signals the US and West are sending. That would have been a smarter Mitt Romney comment -- something akin to what the pre-candidate Mitt Romney would have said.

I too feel for Israelis that live with some level of fear -- but I also have seen first hand what the perversities of Occupation have done to the Palestinians.

Note to Mitt Romney: Watch the tape above of the treatment of a Palestinian by Israeli border police.

Fear-mongering is a crappy way for the GOP to raise money or to animate a new presidential run.

-- Steve Clemons

Editor's Note: This is the Mitt Romney note that his folks sent this morning:

Friend,

I have been to Israel twice -- most recently in 2007. I came away encouraged by what I saw. If we lived in a neighborhood like Israel's, with suicide bombers crossing into our country to kill children in school buses, I'm not sure we could tolerate it. That people actually immigrate to Israel, rather than fleeing from the violence of the Middle East, is a testament to their courage, faith and character. But there is a clear and present danger, above all other threats in the region, and that's Iran.

Iran represents the biggest threat to Israel and peace. Here's how I describe Iran in a column I wrote last week for Human Events:

"The Iranian regime is unalloyed evil, run by people who are at once ruthless and fanatical. We should stop thinking that a charm offensive will talk the Iranians out of their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It will not. And agreements, unenforceable and unverifiable, will have no greater impact here than they did in North Korea. Once an outstretched hand is met with a clenched fist, it becomes a symbol of weakness and impotence. President Eisenhower said it well: 'The care of freedom is not long entrusted to the weak and timid.'"

Please help us spread the message about Iran, its reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons and what that means for Israel with your most generous contribution of $50, $100, $250, $500, $1,000, or even the maximum $5,000, today.

Thank you again for your continued support,

Mitt Romney

P.S. We've recently launched a new SMS text messaging program, and as one of our most dedicated supporters, I hope you'll sign up today to receive exclusive, real-time updates by texting "Go" to GOMITT (466488).

(photo credit: Matt Duss)

Anti J Street Protesters express their views outside the Grand Hyatt Hotel this morning.

-- Steve Clemons

The more I listen to Congressional Opposition chief John Boehner as of late, the more I wish he could find the dignity and common ground for big objectives that Israel's Opposition Party Leader, Kadima Party chief Tzipi Livni, has just demonstrated in a knock-the-ball-out-of-the-park letter to the executive director of the self-described pro-Israel, pro-peace group, J Street

Monopolies don't like competition -- and there is a concerted effort underway now by a giant political monopoly in the 'friends of Israel arena' to squelch alternative voices and players. This isn't good for the current incumbent, nor for the new entrant to the marketplace, nor for American or Israeli interests either.

In a surprisingly stumbly showing, the charismatic Israel Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren has decided to let an underling rather than himself catch the goings on of the J Street conference that is drawing more than 1,500 attendees and whose headliners include both Obama National Security Adviser and 4-star General Jim Jones as well as former Vietnam War veteran and US Senator Chuck Hagel who is said to be President Obama's next chair of the President's Federal Intelligence Advisory Board, a post held by Brent Scowcroft during the first term of the George W. Bush administration.

Ambassador Oren is reportedly a great guy -- but great people tend to rise to represent issues and people above silly rifts and divides. If Jim Jones and Chuck Hagel can support this new American outfit's work, Oren should think hard about putting down too solid a line he won't cross. . .

PARTICULARLY BECAUSE TZIPI LIVNI has sent in a remarkable letter of affirmation to J Street, recognizing potential differences but affiriming a shared strategic vision for the best interests of Israel.

The text of the letter posted above reads:

Leader of the Opposition

MK Tzipi Livni

Jerusalem -- Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Mr. Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director, J Street

Dear Jeremy,

Thank you for your invitation to J Street's first national conference. Unfortunately, my schedule does not allow me to take part in this event but, as you know, "Kadima" will be well represented at the conference by senior members of the Party.

I would like to congratulate you on your inaugural national conference. I believe most American Jews support Israel and want to see it thrive as a Jewish and democratic state. Like you, I believe ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by realizing the vision of two nation state living side by side in peace and security is in the best interests of Israel, the United States, the Palestinians and the region as a whole.

In my view, the discussion which the pro-Israel community of what best advances Israel's cause should be inclusive and broad enough to encompass a variety of views, provided it is conducted in a respectful and legitimate manner. Along the way, we may not agree on everything but I do believe that we must ensure that what unites us as Jews who are committed to Israel's future as a secure, Jewish, and democratic State is far greater than what separates us.

I wish the organizers and the participants much success in the upcoming conference.

Sincerely,

Tzipi Livni

Head of the "Kadima" Party

Leader of The Opposition

State of Israel

Standing ovation to Tzipi Livni for this thoughtful and politically meaningful expression of support for J Street's work.

What really moves me about this note is that the tone and posture of this letter is characteristic of someone who really can and should lead a nation. It's someone who can see beyond factions to what the aspirations of the whole nation need to be.

I hope Ambassador Oren finds other ways to find his way back to being an Ambassador for not just one wing of Israel but for all of the legitimate dimensions of Israel. I have strong confidence that he will -- and I think Tzipi Livni has shown him the way to do it.

-- Steve Clemons

Welcome/Introductions 9:00-9:15

* Steve Coll, New America Foundation
* Karen Greenberg, Center on Law and Security, New York University

Panel I: Situation Assessment: The Threat From Al Qaeda and the Situation in South Asia 9:15-9:45

* Peter Bergen, New America Foundation
* Shuja Nawaz, South Asia Center, Atlantic Council of the United States

Address I: From Liability to Asset: Fixing U.S. Detention Policy in the Field 9:45-10:45

* Major General Douglas Stone (ret), United States Marine Corps
* Introduced by Karen Greenberg, Center on Law and Security, New York University

Address II: Deradicalization: The Saudi Experience 10:45-11:30

* Dr. Abdulrahman al-Hadlag, Ministry of Interior, Saudi Arabia
* Introduced by Peter Bergen, New America Foundation

Panel II: Deradicalization: A Comparative Look from Indonesia to Yemen 11:30-12:00

* Kenneth Ballen, Terror Free Tomorrow
* Gregory Johnsen, Yemeni Deradicalization Expert, Princeton University
* Moderator, Steven Simon, Council on Foreign Relations

Lunch Address: Al Qaeda and Allied Groups: The Evolving Threat 12:00-1:00

* Philip Mudd, Federal Bureau of Investigation
* Introduced by Peter Bergen, New America Foundation

Panel III: Economic Development: Challenges to Operating in Terrorist Sanctuaries 1:00-2:15

* Robert Jenkins, Department of State
* Stephen Lennon, United States Agency for International Development
* James "Spike" Stephenson, Creative Associates International
* Andrew Wilder, Feinstein International Center, Tufts University
* David Katz, Senior Foreign Service Officer
* Moderator: Karin von Hippel, Post-Conflict Reconstruction Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Panel IV: Political Reconciliation: Experience, Opportunities and Obstacles 2:15-3:30

* Noman Benotman, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group Mediator
* Michael Semple, Carr Center on Human Rights, Harvard University
* Robin Poulton, EPES Mandala Consulting; Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Expert
* Moderator: Audrey Kurth Cronin, National Defense University

Panel V: The View from Pakistan 3:30-4:45

* Major General Mahmud Durrani (ret), former Ambassador of Pakistan to the United States.
* Ejaz Haider, Daily Times and The Friday Times
* Lieutenant General Talat Masood (ret), Former Secretary of Defense for Production, Pakistan
* Moderators: Peter Bergen, New America Foundation, and Paolo Ramusino, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

-- Ben Katcher

National Security Adviser Jim Jones is getting out more -- and this is an excellent thing. He recently reinforced the Obama administration's commitment to an active role in Israel-Palestine issues at the annual gala dinner of the American Task Force on Palestine.

Jones is also going to be serving as one of the lead keynote speakers at the first major J Street national policy conference. While Israel Ambassador to the US Michael Oren has officially declined J Street's invitation to attend the meeting, the fact that Jones is going to be there is significant.

Jones, of course, has also and should continue to speak at AIPAC annual conferences and should speak to broader Arab Middle East groups.

The US can't afford making a false choice between Israel's interests and other Arab states'. As far as J Street versus its competition goes, it's a mistake not to embrace heterodoxy of views when it comes to the contours of the US-Israel relationship.

Competition is good in most things - even among interest groups in the same policy arena.

-- Steve Clemons

Yesterday in the Financial Times, Mort Zuckerman suggested that short of a massive government intervention, America was not going to produce anywhere near the number of jobs that needed to be generated -- even as it comes out of recession.

Today, I will be helping to moderate a national economic policy forum, the 3rd New America Foundation/Bernard Schwartz Economic Symposium on America's Jobs Deficit.

It will stream live all day above -- and then video segments will be posted for later viewing tomorrow.

The schedule:

8:30 am
Registration and Coffee

9:00 am
Welcome

Steve Clemons
Director, American Strategy Program
New America Foundation

Steve Coll
President
New America Foundation

9:10 am - How Serious is the Job Crisis?

Joseph E. Gagnon
Senior Fellow
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Gagnon Presentation pdf

Leo Hindery
Managing Partner
InterMedia Partners, LP

Greg Ip
U.S. Economics Editor
The Economist
Ip Presentation pdf

Lenny Mendonca
Chairman
McKinsey Global Institute

moderator
Bruce Stokes
International Economics Correspondent
National Journal

10:00 am
The Jobs Agenda: What Role for State and Federal Governments?

The Hon. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT)
Member, Committee on Appropriations and Committee on the Budget
U.S. House of Representatives

The Hon. Edward G. Rendell
Governor of Pennsylvania

moderator
Marylin Geewax
Senior Business Editor
National Public Radio

10:45 am
Policy Brainstorming and Proposals: Closing the Jobs Deficit

Timothy Bartik
Senior Economist
W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
Bartik Handout pdf

Janet Kavinoky
Director, Transportation & Infrastructure
US Chamber of Commerce

Thea Lee
Policy Director and Chief International Economist
AFL-CIO

Michael Lind
Policy Director, Economic Growth Program
New America Foundation

Michael Mandel
Chief Economist
BusinessWeek

moderator
Sherle R. Schwenninger
Director, Economic Growth Program
New America Foundation

12:00 pm
Luncheon
President Obama's Economic Policy Course: The Jobs Challenge

The Hon. Jared Bernstein
Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor to the Vice President

1:30 pm
Adjournment

-- Steve Clemons

I am back in Washington after a long journey back from Damascus and Amman.

In the next two days, we hope to have the entire video interview I did with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal ready for viewing.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

To discuss the U.S.-China marriage and its future prospects, the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program will host an event TODAY Monday, October 19 from 12:15pm - 1:45pm.

The event will feature Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends Upon It and will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

This is a guest note by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. Flynt directs the New America Foundation/Iran Project and is a former Senior Director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council. Hillary is chairman of Stratega, a political risk consultancy. They are co-publishers of the new blog, The Race for Iran.

Sunday's suicide bomb attack in Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province, in which five senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard and at least 30 other people were killed, marks a significant escalation in an ongoing Sunni Islamist terror campaign directed against the Islamic Republic. We do not believe that Sunday's attack and the ongoing campaign of terrorist violence represents a fundamental threat to the Islamic Republic's basic political stability. However, we do believe the attack will exacerbate Iranian threat perceptions about its regional neighbors and the United States at a delicate point in the diplomatic process launched at the October 1 Geneva meeting between senior Iranian officials and representatives of the P-5+1.

The attacks appear to have been carried out by Jundallah (Arabic for "soldiers of God"), which is also known as the People's Resistance Movement of Iran. Jundallah is a Sunni Islamist group that claims to be fighting for the rights of Sunni Muslims in Iran. Its activities and attacks are focused on Sistan-Baluchistan, which is the Islamic Republic's only Sunni-majority province.

Jundallah's involvement in Sunday's attack exacerbates Iranian threat perceptions in two important ways.

First, the attack will intensify Iranian suspicions about the strategic intentions of Pakistan and Sunni Arab states allied to the United States. In no small part, these suspicions flow from efforts launched by President George W. Bush and continued under President Obama to forge a coalition of Sunni Arab states, along with the United States and Israel, to rollback the recent expansion of Iran's regional influence. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among other U.S. officials, continues to exhort Sunni Arab states to bolster their own military capabilities and join together with the United States and other regional players to "contain" the Islamic Republic.

For their part, Sunni Arab states are increasingly concerned about the Islamic Republic's rising influence in important regional arenas - Iraq, Lebanon, Palestinian politics - which these states decry as Iranian influence in "Arab affairs". In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states have been particularly exercised about what they see as Iranian "meddling" even in Yemen, where indigenous Shi'a have been protesting - sometimes violently - against what they claim is systematic discrimination against them.

Saudi Arabia has been actively seeking ways to "push back" against Iran. For example, the Kingdom played a critical role in funneling money to the March 14 coalition in Lebanon's recent parliamentary elections - including paying for Lebanese expatriates to travel to Lebanon to vote for the March 14 bloc and against Hizballah, which has close ties to the Islamic Republic. In this context, support by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni states for Sunni Islamist groups operating against Iranian interests takes on an ominous cast in Iranian perceptions.

Jundallah is based in Pakistani Baluchistan, part of a dangerous "triangle" encompassing Baluchi areas in Iran, Baluchi areas in Pakistan, and Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan. Jundallah has long received various types of support from Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) Directorate. Indeed, Iranian officials have already said that they believe the perpetrators of Sunday's attack received assistance from ISI. From its base in Pakistani Baluchistan, Jundallah has ample opportunities to forge cooperative ties not only to ISI, but also to the Taliban and third-country intelligence services interested in stoking anti-Iranian activism. In particular, Saudi Arabia's intelligence service has a longstanding strategic collaboration with the ISI as well as a long record of dealing with Sunni Islamist groups operating out of Pakistan.

Second, and even more significantly, many experienced observers of U.S. intelligence activities in Central and South Asia believe that U.S. intelligence agencies have their own ties to Jundallah, and are using the group to foment instability - or, at least, the perception of instability - inside Iran. We do not know what the nature of the CIA's links to Jundallah might be. However, as we wrote in a New York Times Op Ed in May, President Obama inherited from his predecessor a number of overt programs for "democracy promotion" in Iran, as well as covert initiatives directed against Iranian interests. Obama has done nothing to scale back or stop these programs - a posture that has not gone unnoticed in Tehran.

In this context, it will be easy for the Iranian leadership to believe that there was an American hand in Sunday's attack. Notwithstanding State Department denials of U.S. involvement, Iran's Parliament speaker Ali Larijani said explicitly that "the terrorist attack is the result of U.S. efforts and a sign of U.S. hostility towards Iran". Larijani contrasted this "U.S. hostility" to President Obama's offer of an extended hand to Iran, noting that the Iranian people rightly doubt America's intentions.

Those readers familiar with our previous writings on Iran know that we believe the United States needs to reorient its policy toward the Islamic Republic as fundamentally as President Nixon reoriented U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. In this regard, it is illuminating to recall that, within months of taking office in January 1969, Nixon directed the CIA to stand down from a covert operations program in Tibet that had been going on for more than a decade. Similarly, Nixon ordered the Seventh Fleet to stop patrolling in the Taiwan Straits. Nixon took these steps to demonstrate to the Chinese leadership his seriousness about Sino-American strategic rapprochement. It is disappointing that President Obama is not prepared to demonstrate a similar level of seriousness about getting America's Iran policy right.

-- Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

AMMAN, JORDAN -- On Saturday, 17 October, I interviewed Hamas leader Khaled Mashal on a range of subjects at his offices in Damascus, Syria.

The full interview is currently being edited and will be released first at a new blog, The Palestine Note and will then appear here at TWN.

But during the meeting I asked Mashal to reconfirm news that I distributed on Friday -- namely that despite the start-and-stop, blurred comments coming out about whether Hamas and Fatah would meet in Cairo for reconciliation negotiations -- Hamas was going to send a delegation.

Full stop, Mashal confirms this in the seven second video above.

-- Steve Clemons

The idea of being attached to a Siamese twin you're not particularly fond of is a fairly horrifying one to say the least. Yet for the past decade or more, this is exactly the predicament in which the U.S. and China have found themselves.

"Chimerica" is a term concocted by the British historian and economist Niall Ferguson back in 2007. Ferguson coined the phrase to draw attention to the fact that intertwined financial relations have resulted in the countries working as a single economic superstructure, with China doing the saving and the States doing the spending. Depending on how you look at it, this is anything from a match made in heaven to MAD in fiscal form.

The big question zinging around the op-eds and magazines since the trauma of last winter is where this relationship is headed. Ferguson himself annulled the marriage in an August Newsweek article, warning that China could, like pre-WWI Germany, elect instead to cut a solo path for itself as an aggressive expansionist power (there so many holes in this analogy it's barely worth counting them, but The Atlantic's James Fallows has a go here).

It is true that China has been showing signs of trying to loosen the bonds that tie it so closely to America's fortunes. Earlier this year, the head of China's central bank Zhou Xiaochuan published a fairly heavyweight paper on how the world could go about creating a synthetic alternative to the dollar as the world's currency reserve ('we're done buying your debt'). In the meantime, China's leaders have been beating the drum on boosting domestic consumption ever since they announced a $585 billion stimulus package aimed at doing just that ('we're done making your stuff').

It's heady stuff - a Sino-US decoupling would mean big changes in both economic and geopolitical terms. But there are more than a few reasons to be skeptical, at least in the medium term.

Discounting for a moment the global currency issue (even Zhou admits it's a slow burner), a big question mark remains how quickly China can boost its domestic consumption. China's leaders have been reporting impressive increases in retail sales recently, but as Gordon Chang points out in the New York Times, their sums don't really add up.

As far as I can tell, there are multiple and deeply ingrained systemic reasons why extracting itself from its current export-oriented model is going to be a very long, and probably quite painful process for China. Tom Friedman has observed with weak-kneed admiration the ability of autocracies to, you know, really get things done. But while this certainly applies to nice, visible things like rail systems and stadiums, solving complex problems with multiple socioeconomic moving parts is another question entirely:

1. China's policy micromanagement is actually very poor, with implementation at local and provincial level often hopelessly diverted from its original aims by a multitude of competing interests.

2. The inertia behind exports is also huge - dismantling or even readjusting the manufacturing sector as it currently stands will likely mean major job losses - not good in a country where social stability is on a knife-edge. Given how much of China's stimulus money ended up propping up the existing system, this is clearly not a risk Hu Jintao and co. are willing to take just yet.

3. China's households account for only around 30% of GDP - one of the lowest ratios in the world. Even if they were spending every penny of their income, this would barely make a dent in the status quo.

For these and a dozen other reasons, this marriage looks safe, for the time being at least.

To discuss the U.S.-China marriage and its future prospects, the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program will host an event this Monday, October 19 from 12:15pm - 1:45pm. The event will feature Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends Upon It.

The event will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Oliver Lough

Jonathan Guyer is a program associate at the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

-- Jonathan Guyer

Amman, Jordan -- I have just learned through credible sources that the Cairo-brokered reconciliation deal between the Palestinian political parties Fatah and Hamas, while officially delayed at the moment, will get a course correction tomorrow.

Although Hamas called today for a "delay" in the Cairo meeting and deal signing ceremony, I have learned through a credible source that Hamas leader Khaled Mashal will inform the Egyptians tomorrow that he is ready to send a delegation to Cairo.

There have been rumors for weeks that a deal was close -- even though sources also reported the Americans were trying to undermine the process of moving the parties toward a reconciled unity government.

This is huge news -- and has important ramifications for the Israel/Palestine negotiations process that President Obama has been trying to but thus far has failed to kickstart.

-- Steve Clemons

I've been in Amman, Jordan for less than a day -- and the swirl of conflicting emotions here from nearly anyone I have spoken to about the United States is important to note. Most think Barack Obama is an "honest, fair man" and deserves the Nobel, which surprised me -- but then the same people express huge doubts in what is unfolding with Israel and Palestine.

I have been repeatedly told that in the eyes of the Arab world, "Netanyahu won. Obama lost. Abbas lost."

They say that for a while Israel was showing a softer side, rolling back inspection points and harassing Palestinian workers and commuters to a lesser degree -- but things have reversed now.

One person told me that there are now checkpoints around Nablus -- and there hadn't been in a really long time. "These Nablus check points are brand new -- and no one is saying anything about them."

And in Jordan, people at all levels are intensely focused on the White House's growing distance from and opposition to the UN investigation into war crimes violations in the Israel-Gaza war and the so-called Goldstone Report.

Some have told me that the US talks a good game about international law and human rights, but when a report emerges chaired by one of the world's most respected, leading human rights and war crimes jurists, America goes the realpolitik course and embraces Israel no matter its behavior.

What I see is that while Barack Obama himself has often presented a vision of the Middle East with Israel and Arab states both in stable relationships with each other and with the United States, just about everyone else -- including many on his own national security team -- continue to push a false choice that favors America's interests with Israel over Arab states.

This choice is a bad one for the U.S. -- and Obama needs to realize that his team is failing to demonstrate that it has the ability to define reasonable lines for Israel with which the Arab world can then converge.

-- Steve Clemons

Today, I happen to be in Amman, Jordan -- just arrived and learned that today is the 10th Anniversary of the accession to the throne of King Abdullah and the 60th Anniversary of diplomatic relations with the U.S.

Prince Zeid Ra'ad, Jordan's Ambassador to the United States (who had been this blog's preference to be Secretary General of the United Nations in the last round), hosted a great party this evening in the Library of Congress with my friend Congressman Brian Baird (D-WA) and other Members -- but I didn't get to partake as was already in route over here.

The King has been outstanding in my view in standing as a resolute, clear-headed voice in favor of ending the status quo of doing nothing in the Israel-Palestine dispute.

I am over here doing some interviews and will be in Syria tomorrow.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. Flynt directs the New America Foundation/Iran Project and is a former Senior Director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council. Hillary is chairman of Stratega, a political risk consultancy. They are co-publishers of the forthcoming blog, The Race for Iran.

As anticipated in our post on this blog on October 13 (and a monograph published by Johns Hopkins' Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies earlier this week), China authoritatively signaled today that it will not support the imposition of anything approaching "crippling" international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear activities.

Nor will Chinese leaders support measures that would negatively impact what Beijing sees as its most important economic and strategic interests at stake in China's developing relationship with the Islamic Republic.

Indeed, after meeting with Iran's Vice President, Mohammad Reza Rahimi, in Beijing, China's Premier Wen Jiabao noted that Sino-Iranian "cooperation in trade and energy has widened and deepened", and stated that the Chinese government "will maintain high-level exchanges with Iran, enhance mutual understanding and trust, promote bilateral pragmatic cooperation and coordinate closely in international affairs".

Wen's statement comes a day after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - who has done more than anyone else in the Obama Administration to promulgate the threat of "crippling" sanctions if Tehran does not surrender on the nuclear issue - was disabused of whatever illusions she was clinging to about Moscow's willingness to support a strategically meaningful intensification of international pressure on the Islamic Republic.

Furthermore, it comes a day after Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs Kurt Campell, also in Beijing, offered more hot air about "the need to see more cooperation and coordination between the United States and China" regarding Iran.

We supported Barack Obama in his campaign for the White House in 2008 - but we have to say that, at this point, it is hard to identify any significant improvement in America's Iran policy under President Obama compared to the strategically dysfunctional approach pursued by the George W. Bush Administration.

The Obama Administration's continuing advocacy of a "dual track" approach to Iran is particularly misleading. There is not a serious sanctions "option" for resolving the nuclear issue or other strategic differences with Iran. The Administration's constant cheer leading for sanctions does nothing for U.S. interests - but will undercut the credibility of whatever diplomatic overtures Secretary Clinton and her colleagues make toward Tehran.

The "dual track" approach only makes sense as a lowest-common-denominator consensus position among different camps of Obama's foreign policy and political advisers. Looking for that kind of consensus may have been an effective way to run the Harvard Law Review. It is not a way to define coherent and effective foreign policy.

Significantly, the meeting between Wen and Rahimi took place on the margins of a summit meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization - a regional security forum comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, in which Iran, India, and Pakistan have observer status.

Among other things, summit participants will be launching discussions about expanding use of member states' currencies for intra-SCO trade (including oil and gas), thereby reducing the dollar's use as a transactional currency.

It is popular in U.S. foreign policy circles to dismiss the SCO as a "talk shop". But we think the SCO is interesting as a harbinger of future strategic trends - trends that, left unchecked, could profoundly accelerate the decline of America's strategic position. Checking those trends requires that the United States pursue a fundamentally different sort of relationship with Iran.

But that won't happen until the Obama Administration faces reality about what its options really are.

Hillary and I will be launching our own blog, The Race for Iran, next week. We hope you will take a look.

-- Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Jon Weinberg is a research intern at the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force.

A couple of weeks ago, Angelina Jolie, who makes periodic trips as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), visited Iraqi refugees in southern Damascus along with her partner, Brad Pitt. The purpose of Jolie's visit was to raise awareness for the plight of those Iraqis displaced since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In her own words: "Most Iraqi refugees cannot return to Iraq in view of the severe trauma they experienced there, the uncertainty linked to the coming [January 16, 2010] Iraqi elections, the security issues and the lack of basic services..."

Not surprisingly, Jolie and Pitt's visit seems to have been largely understood (and sometimes dismissed) as the world's sexiest couple's latest humanitarian holiday. Nonetheless, the issue of Iraqi refugees has not gotten the attention it deserves.

According to Refugees International, since March of 2003 more than 1.5 million Iraqis have fled to neighboring countries and 2.7 million Iraqis have become internally displaced. Iraq's population is around 30 million, about one-tenth that of the US. So, to put those numbers of refugees and displaced persons into perspective, imagine that 27 million Americans were internally displaced and an additional 15 million fled to Canada and Mexico.

Consequently, the Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian governments are all faced with a long-term crisis that could easily develop into interminable catastrophe: a large population of permanent refugees.

If this scenario sounds familiar, it is. These same countries (including Iraq) have been dealing with permanent populations of Palestinian refugees since Israel expelled approximately 750,000 Palestinians following the country's creation in 1948 - a series of events which the Arab world commonly calls al Nakba, "the catastrophe."

Syria, for instance, has absorbed well over a million Iraqi refugees - about three times the number of Palestinian refugees already living in the country. Roughly speaking, this means that perhaps one of every twenty people living in Syria is an Iraqi refugee. A recent Daily Star article highlights the challenges this situation has forced on the Syrian government:

This huge flood of new arrivals into Syria has put extraordinary pressure on the country's limited resources. The prices of real estate, food, electricity, kerosene and other commodities have skyrocketed, while the country's school rooms, clinics and hospitals are strained as a result of overcrowding.

These new pressures are compounded by Syria's own problems. Unemployment in Syria stands at 9 percent, and despite some development in recent years, poverty remains widespread. The country's worst drought in decades has forced tens of thousands of Syrian families to leave their farms and head to cities to search for work.

In short, the situation has continued to deteriorate. The plight of Iraqi refugees was a hot news item during the peak of Iraqi internal violence in 2006 and 2007. As the troop surge began to quell violence, however, general interest in the status of refugees cooled off.

Recently, as the American public has grown used to the eventuality of a US withdrawal from Iraq, more questions have begun to arise about resettling Iraqis in the United States. In their recent AP article, Sharon Cohen and Lisa Orkin Emmanuel note that only "about 38,000 Iraqis have come to the United States in the last three fiscal years, compared with just hundreds in the three prior years," not all of them refugees.

While this figure may seem surprisingly low when compared to the United States' responsibility for displacing Iraqis in the first place, the small number is not out of line with historical norms. For instance, only 650 Vietnamese citizens arrived in the US between 1950 and 1974 (mostly the wives and children of American servicemen), but hundreds of thousands came after the fall of Saigon in 1975.

What's more, those who have made it to the United States this year are finding it increasingly difficult to find employment. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has reported that while it was comparatively simple to find jobs for the mere hundreds of Iraqi refugees who came in 2007, very few of the thousands who have come in 2008 and 2009 are considered self-sufficient.

In the UK, the problem is even worse. Al Jazeera reported yesterday that 40 Iraqi asylum seekers will be sent back to Baghdad this week. This is hardly remarkable considering that "according to Britain's interior ministry, 632 people were deported to northern Iraq between 2005 and 2008."

All told, when Syria is arguably doing a better job of handling a humanitarian crisis than the US and the UK, it is fitting to start asking a lot of questions.

-- Jon Weinberg

Stephen Kinzer, author of Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds and one of the United States' most knowledgeable Turkophiles, has an optimistic op-ed in today's Boston Globe about the recent normalization agreement between Turkey and Armenia and Turkey's potential as a regional power.

Kinzer is very optimistic about Turkey's potential to be a leader and peace-builder in the Middle East and Central Asia. He identifies Cyprus as the one remaining obstacle to Turkey's ascension on the world stage.

He hastens to add that Turkey needs to sort out its own domestic social contract before it can assume the kind of leadership role that Kinzer envisions. Indeed, achieving balances among freedom and security; Islamists and secularists; and military and civilian leadership remain huge challenges - but this week's agreement with Armenia is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

From the article:

For nearly all of its 86 years as a state, Turkey has kept a low profile in the world. Those days are over. Now Turkey is reaching for a highly ambitious regional role as a conciliator and peacemaker.

When Turkish officials land in bitterly divided countries like Lebanon or Afghanistan or Pakistan, every faction is eager to talk to them. No country's diplomats are as welcome in both Tehran and Jerusalem, Moscow and Tblisi, Damascus and Cairo. As a Muslim country intimately familiar with the region around it, Turkey can go places, engage partners, and make deals that the United States cannot.

This new Turkish role holds tantalizing potential. Before Turkey can play it fully, though, it must put its own house in order. That is one reason its leaders were so eager to resolve their country's dispute with Armenia.

Turkey has one remaining international problem to resolve: Cyprus. Then it must solidify its democracy at home. That means lifting restrictions on free speech and fully respecting minority rights not just those of Kurds, whose culture has been brutalized by decades of repression, but also those of Christians, non-mainstream Muslims, and unbelievers.

Under other circumstances, Egypt, Pakistan, or Iran might have emerged to lead the Islamic world. Their societies, however, are weak, fragmented, and decomposing. Indonesia is a more promising candidate, but it has no historic tradition of leadership and is far from the center of Muslim crises. That leaves Turkey. It is trying to seize this role. Making peace with Armenia was an important step. More are likely to come soon.

You can read the entire article here.

-- Ben Katcher

This is a guest note by Arianna Huffington who co-founded and serves as editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post.

This post originally appeared on September 25th at The Huffington Post, but TWN has asked permission to cross post Arianna's thoughts here as there is no stamp on her observations.

Israel Diary: A Tale of Two Visits

JERUSALEM -- At 2 a.m. on Friday morning (September 25), the streets outside my hotel in Jerusalem were jam-packed with thousands of people making their way to the Wailing Wall where, the day before, I had placed my own folded up prayer -- and where I had to cover my exposed shoulders with a hastily borrowed shawl. What is it about shoulders, in particular, that God would find so disquieting?

Early Friday morning I headed to Tel Aviv to visit the Bialik Rogozin School, an extraordinary example of what is possible with real leadership.

The school has 750 students from 48 countries, including 21 orphans from Darfur. The majority of them come from the poorest parts of Israeli society -- all studying together with stunning results. In Israel as a whole, 46 percent of high school graduates go on to higher education. At the Rogozin School, Martin Karp, of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation that provides a lot of support for the school, told me that figure is 68 percent. "68.6," Karen Tal, the school's director corrected him.

And it is Karen Tal's leadership that is undoubtedly the key to the school's remarkable transformation. Born in Morocco, she took over as director three years ago. When she arrived at the school, it was plagued by every possible problem, including outbreaks of violence and dilapidated surroundings.

But the school I toured with her was immaculate, with students' paintings covering the walls, and new computers throughout. In one classroom, whose occupants looked like a mini-United Nations, kindergarteners were joyfully singing and dancing together. In another, I sat at a table with teenage students telling me their stories. Two sisters had come from Ghana; one boy from Ethiopia; another girl from Georgia; another from the Congo. A girl from Turkey had a particularly sad story, because she and her single mother, who works as a housekeeper, are facing deportation, as they are in Israel illegally. But everyone on the school's board is using all their influence to try to keep the girl and her mother in the country. "It would be so hard for her to go back and try to restart her life in Turkey," Tal told me.

I left Bialik Rogozin energized and inspired. So it was particularly jarring to drive straight from the school to the West Bank to see the Jewish settlements that have become a flashpoint of the stalled peace process.

The security wall. The roadblocks and barbed wire. The separate roads that the Palestinians have to use. The checkpoints and "buffer zones." The very large, sprawling, and very permanent-looking Israeli settlements carved out on Palestinian land. No wonder Palestinians feel like strangers in their own land.

Taking it all in, it's hard not to feel weighed down by a sense of hopelessness over the divisions that seem even more entrenched and permanent than the intruding settlements themselves.

Standing at one of the checkpoints, my mind went back to the school. There, the differences between nationalities felt utterly superficial, almost irrelevant. Here, the differences felt vast and unbridgeable.

Yet, in this land of miracles, we can still imagine the emergence of the kind of leadership that can transform both old hatreds and the facts on the ground.

-- Arianna Huffington

I was supposed to be flying off to Portland, Oregon tomorrow to speak to the Portland Business Alliance on Friday on the subject of America's "Green Trade Deficit."

I very much looked forward to the trip not only to see a great friend, Jonathan Williams from Intel, who helped set this up but because I got a good dozen emails from folks who wanted to show me the green urban planning of the City and to do a Washington Note coffee chat on DC politics, policy and gossip.

Here are some of the "green accolades" Portland has received:

* No. 1, "Most eco-friendly big cities in America" - SustainLane.com (September 2008)

* No. 2, "Top 25 Green Cities in America" - Country Home (March 2008)

* No. 1, "Greenest City in America" - Popular Science (February 2008)

* No. 1, Cityscape / No. 1, "Environmental Awareness" - CNN/Travel + Leisure (October 2007)

* Best Cycling City in the U.S. - Bicycling magazine (March 2006)

* "Best Towns in the U.S. - The New American Dream Towns" - Outside magazine (August 2005)

* America's "Best running town" and "Best urban running trail: the Leif Erickson Trail" -- Runner's World (May 2003)

* "America's most unwired city" (best wireless Internet accessibility in the nation) -- Intel Survey (March 2003)

* "The City of Portland has a nationally recognized reputation for green building innovation and outreach." -- U.S. Green Building Council (2003)

* "Top Recycler Among the Nation's 30 Largest Cities" -- Waste News (2001)

* "North America's No. 1 Cycling City" -- Bicycling magazine (2001)

* "Portland's Forest Park ranked "Best urban park" in the nation -- Outside magazine (Oct. 2001)

I have had to postpone the meeting because of an urgent and unexpected alternative meeting in the Middle East that I had to get to. I thank my friends in Portland for their flexibility and understanding.

I will be off to Amman, Jordan and Damascus, Syria tonight -- if I get all of the visas needed within the day.

More on the Middle East trip later.

-- Steve Clemons

At the Clinton Global Initiative, I interviewed Palestinian-American businessman Hani Masri, founder of Tomorrow's Youth Organization, an institution based in Nablus in the West Bank of Palestine that is committed to improving the lives and opportunities of young Palestinian women.

Masri's comments are richly filled with a frustration of years of trying to end the occupation of Palestine and move to a stable, peaceful situation with Israel. He is now working to build capacity and institutions in Palestine that are not dependent on Israel or negotiators.

Recently, I also interviewed Cherie Blair of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women who has partnered with Masri's operation to provide women who graduate from Tomorrow's Youth with career counseling and resource help after they leave the program.

Masri has also helped co-found a new political blog that is informally tied to TWN called The Palestine Note.

-- Steve Clemons

This is a guest note by Flynt Leverett. Flynt directs the New America Foundation/Iran Project and is the former Senior Director of Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council. He is also publisher of the forthcoming blog, The Race For Iran.

A lot of attention is being focused on Chinese policy toward Iran, particularly with reference to the Obama Administration's threats to impose "crippling" international sanctions if diplomacy does not provide Washington with satisfaction (however defined) regarding Iran's nuclear activities.

This week, the Reischauer Center for East Asian Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS published a monograph on China-Iran relations that I co-authored with Hillary Mann Leverett and John Garver (an outstanding China expert at Georgia Tech's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs).

All modesty aside, the monograph, Moving (Slightly) Closer to Iran: China's Shifting Calculus for Managing Its "Persian Gulf Dilemma", is the best work out there on this critical issue. The monograph documents how China is proceeding to develop an increasingly strategic energy relationship with the Islamic Republic - including a growing number of upstream investment positions by Chinese energy companies.

While China remains disinclined to challenge America's longstanding hegemony in the Gulf directly, Beijing is becoming more assertive about advancing its own economic and energy interests in Iran. Under these circumstances, China is not about to support anything approaching "crippling" economic sanctions against Iran.

Of course, China's developing ties to the Islamic Republic have broader geopolitical implications. Later this week, Hillary and I will launch a new blog, The Race for Iran, focused on the Islamic Republic and its geopolitics. We think that many readers of The Washington Note will also like The Race for Iran, and invite you to give it a try.

-- Flynt Leverett

This is a guest "note" by Daniel Levy.

Daniel Levy directs the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force and formerly served as a senior Israeli negotiator. Levy is a principle drafter of the Geneva Israel-Palestine accords.

Israel's parliament, the Knesset, reopened today after a long break for the summer and the Jewish holidays. In line with protocol, Israel's president opened the winter session and Shimon Peres had this to say on the linkage between reaching peace with the Palestinians and addressing the Iran issue:

In my opinion, if we move forwards with peace and make peace with the Palestinians, and if we start negotiations with Syria and Lebanon, we will remove the main pretext for the Iranian madness - against us and against the other residents of this region. (President Peres, October 12th in the Israeli Knesset).

Now Mr. Peres is in reality not exactly the dove he is portrayed to be (he authorized many of the settlements, he supported Israel's recent wars with Lebanon and Gaza, and he never really earned his own Nobel peace prize), but this was nonetheless an interesting acknowledgment of the linkage from Israel's head of state - and it seems to directly contradict the messaging coming from Israel's ambassador to Washington D.C., Michael Oren.

Here's Michael Oren in an interview on October 3rd for Newsweek:

Q: Do you believe that the Arab states would make their support of action against Iran contingent on progress in the peace process?

A: No, there is no linkage whatsoever. The Arab states understand that the peace process is going to take a while, and we don't have a while with Iran. The peace clock and the Iranian nuclear clock are running at completely different speeds.

Oren was simply, and spiritedly, sticking to a lame PR line that has now been exposed as rubbish by none other than Israels' own president. On entering office six months ago, Prime Minister Netanyahu tried a similar trick, arguing that Iran would have to be dealt with first and that the Palestinian issue could be placed on the backburner. But President Obama wasn't buying any of that, insisting that both issues be addressed in parallel, and much to the chagrin of the Likud hawks, making Israeli-Palestinian peace a priority - something he repeated when responding to being awarded the Nobel peace prize last Friday.

The linkage, though aggressively denied by occupation apologists, is all too real (and credit to President Peres for acknowledging that). Here's how it works.

Iran's ability to spread influence and use leverage in the region is partly a product of the largesse it spreads around and of the allies it has through denominational allegiance or simple patronage. But crucially, it also depends on the narrative that Iran espouses--and the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to that. Iran does not have an appealing story to tell the region when it comes to it system of governance based on an interpretation of Shia jurisprudence (Velayat-e Faqih) or when it comes to its internal freedoms and achievements.

Rather, the narrative which allows Iran to speak to the Muslim and notably Sunni street, above the heads of Arab leaders, can be paraphrased as follows:

Only we, Iran, are standing up to the Israelis and the Americans in defense of our downtrodden Palestinian brothers and sisters; you, the Arab leadership who are close to America, host American troops, visit Washington and do Washington's bidding, and are even openly or sometimes secretly in contact with the Israelis--all these friendships have done nothing to help the Palestinians or address their grievance; our version of resistance is therefore honorable when compared to your shameful collusion.

It may be grating to the ear and make us feel uncomfortable, but that is a message that resonates. And that is what President Peres seemed to understand in suggesting that peace with the Palestinians would, in his words, "remove the main pretext for the Iranian madness."

Ending the occupation and delivering peace would fundamentally undermine Iran's narrative and its leverage.

Realizing a comprehensive peace can be done as part of a process of U.S. dialogue with Iran in which these issues are also raised, or it can be done in parallel to an engagement with Iran (it should not be done as part of a blunt, unsophisticated frontal assault on Iran, as was tried at Annapolis during the Bush presidency).

However, it appears that the neoconservatives in this country and their Likud friends in Israel, who expend so much time and energy in refuting this linkage, just forgot to cc Israel's president on the talking points memo.

-- Daniel Levy

Here is a short clip of my appearance on Countdown tonight discussing Liz Cheney's reaction to Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Got a lot of reaction to my talking about pugnacious nationalists disdainful of the international system -- and my mentioning the Borg and comparing them to Cheneyesque neoconservatives. More later.

-- Steve Clemons

This evening at 8:15 pm Eastern time, I'll be in Countdown with Keith Olbermann discussing Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize and how crazy it has made some of America's leading pugnacious nationalists, particularly Liz Cheney.

Some background reading: My CNN piece on the subject. A first and second response from the reasonable opposition at Powerline.

My response -- and then theirs. These folks showed how to have a debate with humor and civility.

And then Liz Cheney's comments. And Josh Marshall gets Liz on her critique/slip comparing how Obama "ruled" America contrasted with the Bush/Cheney years.

8:15 pm EST -- and then again at 10:15 pm EST.

-- Steve Clemons

While putting back together the United States' foreign policy portfolio, one of the key challenges for the Obama administration will be to engage rising powers like China, India and Brazil without offending traditional allies, including Japan.

The future of the U.S.-Japan alliance and Japan's international role going forward will be the discussion of a New America Foundation/American Strategy Program event today from 12:15pm - 1:45pm.

The event will feature Stanley Foundation Program Officer and Powers and Principles Editor David Shorr, Mansfield Foundation Adjunct Fellow Weston Konishi, and New America Foundation/American Strategy Program Director Steve Clemons.

The event will air on CSPAN in the next several days and will stream live right here at The Washington Note.

-- Ben Katcher

I have to confess. I read Powerline and have particularly enjoyed the writing of Paul Mirengoff who is a sharp intellectual usually committed to just about everything I'm not.

Powerline has just bestowed two awards on my CNN comment on Obama's Nobel Prize. Mirengoff made it a runner's up to the "silliest writing of 2008" which he gave my piece on suggesting that Caroline Kennedy be made US Ambassador to the Court of St. James's or some other spot as a way out of the New York Senate seat drama. I stand by my piece then but enjoyed Paul poking at it.

I stand by my CNN piece on Obama as well. I'm a frequent critic of the Obama team's tactics -- but I still have confidence in the President's overall foreign policy course. Obama quickly changed the optics of the global order -- and for Paul and his colleagues to so quickly disparage that accomplishment -- I'd only remind them of Karl Rove's spin-meistering in the George W. Bush White House and comments like, "We make our own reality."

But I like this sort of debate and appreciate Powerline recognizing my work with both good humor and a predictably alternative take.

And thanks to Paul Rahe for acknowledging that I provided the only conceivable rationale explaining why President Obama should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. (not looking for a job with the administration though Paul -- ruined that with less flattering pieces on the administration's tactical performance).

And I had a third fun note this weekend as well from Jungle Jim of Provocateur. He wrote that I had won the Socialist Moonbat of the Week Award for my CNN piece -- and was kind enough to send me a congratulatory note which I received while listening to powerful remarks from Desmond Tutu being read at opening of Equality March on Washington ceremonies.

Thanks to all of you -- you handled your differences with me with class and good humor.

Now we just need some of your readers to act similarly as my email is filled with some of the most vile, degrading hate mail I have ever received.

But the delete key works well -- and I appreciate the hard right taking an interest in stuff here at The Washington Note.

-- Steve Clemons

This pic was sent to me by a soldier who has just returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm surprised he wanted to see more sand, but given this pic from his hotel room, I understand.

I occasionally run interesting pics sent in by readers. Andrew Sullivan gave me permission to copy his practice.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons

A few years ago, I was invited to an extraordinary set of meetings in Beijing organized by Marika Vicziany of Monash University. The meeting featured participants like then Labor Party leader (and next Australia Ambassador to the U.S.) Kim Beazley and former Ministers of Defense of India and China - and leading policy personalities from the Asia Pacific region. And Generals from Pakistan.

I was the token American in what was a fascinating exercise of China, India and Pakistan former officials floating trial balloons about their respective nations' security needs and assessments among a ring of people very close to incumbent power.

My flight was late, but when I arrived I rushed in to the conference opening luncheon and sat at the first table I found a seat. I usually say hello to every person at tables I'm seated at and did so this time.

And as I worked around the group, I met a tough-edged but obviously seriously intelligent general from Pakistan, Asad Durrani. I didn't know much about him then but could tell that my table companions had been discussing Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) - so I jumped in with a question:

General Durrani, does President Musharraf really not control the ISI? Or is this a big put-on?

I had hit a nerve of the table as every jaw dropped -- except Durrani's.

He sat there, quite nonplussed by the question which I had just pitched to the person everyone but I knew had actually been the head of ISI in the early 1990s.

Durrani seemed to like my candor, and he candidly responded:

President Musharraf may have much to gain by seeming that he does not control ISI.

I became quite taken with the level-headed candor and smart strategic sense General Durrani displayed over the next two days -- and his comments about ISI and Pakistan's political leadership were deeply imprinted on my thinking about the shell game of trusting Pakistan's intelligence and national security services.

Now after news that nine armed terrorists linked to al Qaeda and Pakistan's Taliban infiltrated the command headquarters of Pakistan's military, it seems to me that whatever certainty of control Pakistan's political and military leaders had over their ranks is now broken.

The Rawalpindi incident could not have occurred without inside help, and fortunately, one of the ringleaders in the attack, a former soldier named Muhammad Aqeel, was captured.

Pakistan's responsible national intelligence authorities must now begin to track all of the contacts and intelligence relations of this terrorist operation and purge their ranks of those connected. When Aldrich Ames was hiding behind mole hunts in the CIA, it finally took an investigation by the FBI to finally bring him down.

Painful as internal hunts can be for those who are collaborating with enemies of a state, they must be pursued because confidence can't be established without purging those who are helping to empower the most virulent wings of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as al Qaeda and other groups.

This is Pakistan's fight but it has bearing on all of its allies and partners -- but tolerating a Pakistan security structure that is unwilling to exploit every lead to shut down internal spies and allies of those trying to bring down the Pakistani government and secure its nuclear weapons is not an option.

Pakistan should establish a Commission headed by General Asad Durrani with other former ISI director generals to run this search and hunt among their ranks.

The military and national security bureaucracy may protect some of their own in such a purge -- but in the end, all of those who are embedded and collaborating with the likes of those who led the military attack at Command Headquarters need to be neutralized.

-- Steve Clemons

The cost of America's military effort in Afghanistan is $65 billion per year -- and the price tag will probably go up when a new strategy is announced by President Obama.

There have been many hundreds killed and thousands wounded there.

But what gets me is that the entire GDP of Afghanistan is just $22 billion.

We are spending -- just on the military and not counting allied force commitments or NGO and other non-military aid -- more than three times the entire GDP of the country.

And we have been losing this war.

And now the military wants more resources, more troops and more funding?

-- Steve Clemons

Last evening at the Washington Convention Center, President Barack Obama spoke before a crowd of 3,000 at the 13th Annual Human Rights Campaign dinner.

The event was covered live not only on C-Span but ran live on CNN and was covered in full by MSNBC. This was huge -- an event committed to ending discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people ran live through two of the most important news and policy networks in the country. That is change.

But guess what. When it comes to White House internal priorities -- Bo the Dog gets higher billing than the President articulating a human rights agenda before a GLBT audience.

The White House, thus far, has nothing about the President's speech on its main site. Nothing at "Speeches and Remarks."

And even on the official White House Blog, there is a suspicious gap between an entry yesterday titled "Happy Birthday Bo!" and a one-minute-past-midnight posting on the President's weekly address on health care.

President Obama said to the assembled, powerhouse crowd of gay Americans, Tipper Gore, the cast of Glee, Matthew Shepard's parents -- Dennis and Judy, Lady Gaga, Frank Kameny, Office of Personnel Management Chief John Berry, US Ambassador designate to New Zealand David Huebner, and others:

I'm here with you in that fight.

My commitment to you is unwavering.

Great words from the President. Obama acknowledged those who feel that he has not yet done enough.

You can watch the speech here on MSNBC, but you can't read those words on the White House website -- at least not yet.

What's the issue here? Why is this Obama public statement being treated differently from other major statements he makes?

Last night at 5:30 pm, I called White House press and asked to make sure that I got an emailed copy of the remarks which would probably be time embargoed. I left email and phone number as the phone recording requested, but there was no follow up.

I ran into Brian Bond, the capable Deputy Director of White House Public Liaison, before Obama's speech last night and was told that we would get the speech and not to worry.

Thanks to C-Span and MSNBC, folks can watch the speech -- so it's not completely out of public view, and the White House did distribute the "pool reporting" on Obama's 25 minutes at the HRC Dinner in which he reported that he had really made it as the opening act for Lady Gaga.

But on a serious level, a speech of this magnitude should be distributed to the media and made available to the public in the same timely way that other Presidential speeches are. We who were writing about this should have received an embargoed copy of the remarks "as prepared," and then a follow up set of remarks "as given."

But nothing yet on the White House web page -- and nothing in my in box about Barack Obama's commitment to end "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and his commitment to pass an exclusive Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which were hight points of his remarks.

This is meant to be a friendly critique -- but while the gay community at the HRC dinner was enormously enthusiastic that Barack Obama was the first President since Bill Clinton in 1997 to speak at its annual event, we don't want the important remarks the President gave hidden so as not to make the weekend news cycle.

Note to White House Communications office, please get the speech on the White House website and distributed to the media and American public.

Obama's remarks were important.

I'll be watching my inbox.

-- Steve Clemons

Update: Finally received President Obama's speech. It can be read after the break.

"The Japanese," writes Masaru Tamamoto, "are a people who endlessly and fruitly ask who they are."

If this is the case, then the dramatic re-shaping of their political landscape has provided the Japanese (and everybody else) a rich new opportunity to indulge in their national pastime.

The country's new prime minister Yokio Hatoyama (a.k.a. "the alien") and his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) elbowed their way past the country's half-century old political status-quo to seize power with an overwhelming mandate in last month's election.

With America's political and economic influence on the wane, China on the rise, and the global economic system still in a state of tentative rehab, the new administration finds itself presented with an intriguing opportunity to re-define (or at least, restate) its regional and international role.

For virtually its entire post-war history, Japan has been a paragon of what would now be termed "responsible global stakeholdership," albeit one nestled securely under the wing of American protection. Anti-war, anti-proliferation, pro-market, the country threw its weight firmly behind developing a system of global norms and institutions at a time when most countries were more busy squaring off on opposite sides of the iron curtain.

But at a time when the importance of a truly internationalized global order is more clear than ever, Japan's role as its main trailblazer is looking a little wobbly. Junichiro Koizumi's decision to support America's 2003 invasion of Iraq without a UN mandate marked the start of a gradual shuffle in the direction of becoming a more unilateral, interest driven, "normal" country. The Bush administration talked hopefully of turning the country into "Asia's Britain," while at the fringes of domestic politics, a long-dormant brand of chauvinist nationalism began to carve a niche for itself once more.

Unfortunately, assertiveness abroad has been matched with apathy back home. China's rapid expansion has led some to suggest that the best the country can hope for is to retire gracefully as the region's Canada. But years of indifferent and sometimes outright catastrophic economic performance have left many Japanese with much gloomier expectations; according to one recent survey, Japan's business executives are the most pessimistic in the world when appraising their future prospects.

Although they have been criticized by some for being a little fuzzy round the edges, there is hope that the Hatoyama administration's fresh set of policy offerings could go some way toward arresting this sense of drift. An ambitious program of expanding the country's safety net should give domestic consumption the required kick in the pants, while a more integrationist approach in Asia is back in step with the fine Japanese tradition of institution-building, albeit in a new and more local guise.

It's too early to say where all this will end up. Without anybody to fill its boots, U.S. military influence in the Pacific is likely to remain a deciding factor in regional geopolitics for some time to come. Still, the prospect of a regional free trade pact raised at this week's meeting between China, Japan and Korea is an encouraging step. In an increasingly multipolar world, Japan could certainly do worse that end up as Asia's Brussels.

Japan's future international role will be the subject of an event at the New America Foundation tomorrow Monday, October 12 from 12:15pm - 1:45pm featuring David Shorr, Weston Konishi and Steve Clemons.

The speakers will discuss Japan in the context of Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World, a new book on global governance.

This event will stream live here at The Washington Note.

-- Oliver Lough

-- Steve Clemons

Below follows the lead from a piece I just wrote for CNN on Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. An interesting tidbit that I learned from a TWN reader -- though I'm not sure it's accurate -- is that Nobel Prize nominations were due by February 1st -- thus just nine days after Barack Obama's Inauguration.

Even if true, the Nobel Prize committee chose shrewdly in my view.

Here is the intro to my CNN comment:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Cynics will say that Oslo was jealous that Copenhagen, Denmark, scored a visit from President Obama, and giving him a Nobel was the only way to get him to Norway.

But the Nobel Committee's decision to make Obama the only sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson to receive the Nobel Peace Prize shows the committee's clear-headed assessment that Obama's "unclenched fist" approach to dealing with the world's most thuggish leaders has had a constructive, systemic impact on the world's expectations of itself.

Obama has helped citizens all around the world -- including in the United States -- to want a world beyond the mess we have today in the Middle East and South Asia. They want a world where America is benign and positive, and where other leaders help in supporting the struggles of their people for better lives rather than securing themselves through crude power.

Obama has found a way in this interconnected world of cell phones, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking to reach a majority of the world's citizens with his message of hope for a better world. He speaks past the dictators to regular people and has, on the whole, raised global political expectations about everything from climate change to nuclear nonproliferation in ways that no one in history has done before.

Here is the entire piece.

-- Steve Clemons

Last week, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett penned a New York Times op-ed advocating for a robust effort to achieve a "grand bargain" with the Iranians, rather than continuing down the Bush-Obama path of "containment."

In response, Dan Drezner over at Foreign Policy wrote a very critical response, in which he counted the ways that he did not like the Leveretts op-ed.

I then responded to Drezner's post on this blog.

The folks over at Blogging Heads must have picked up on this exchange, because they arranged for a "debate" between Leverett and Drezner, which I have posted above.

I put "debate" in quotation marks because this particular blogging heads session is not really a traditional back and forth argument. Instead, it consists of Drezner asking a series of critical questions (and rolling his eyes), and Leverett offering responses.

Still, the session is an excellent primer on why working toward a "grand bargain" with Iran could be a real game changer for the United States - and how the obstacles to getting there can be overcome.

The part of the exchange I found most interesting (at about 28:30) was when Flynt laid out exactly why a grand bargain is necessary. He argues that none of our most urgent objectives in the Middle East (solving the Israel/Palestine issue, putting Lebanon on a more stable path, improving conditions in Iraq) can be solved without a more productive U.S.-Iranian relationship. Therefore we either strike a deal with the Iranians or we continue to muddle along without success on these pressing issues.

-- Ben Katcher

Forget the Chicago Olympics foul up. Barack Obama has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize -- the first sitting US President to win the Prize since Woodrow Wilson.

The Nobel citation reads:

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

This is great news. There are some who will argue that a build up of forces in Afghanistan, unresolved efforts in Israel-Palestine, and a lot yet to do with regarding to changing Iran's course make this Prize seem premature.

But the reality is that this Prize puts some air back in the Obama Bubble -- and this is good for the country and world as the challenges in the international system are enormous today.

Obama's efforts to talk the world into a better place have indeed created opportunities that were hard to imagine during the Bush administration -- but now a lot of heavy lifting and deal-making are required, and the Nobel Prize will give Obama a boost in these efforts.

Congrats to the President.

-- Steve Clemons

Former Reagan Administration Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State George Shultz thinks that the US embargo against Cuba should "simply be lifted."

In a letter issued by Secretary Shultz to David Dreyer and the Center for Democracy in the Americas, Shultz writes (pdf available here):

I have long felt and have said publicly on a number of occasions that, with the cold war behind us, we should simply remove the embargo on Cuba.

I'm glad to hear that you are making headway on a bill that would repeal the travel ban for all Americans. This is a step in the right direction. I am glad to be on record, and you may quote me as supporting this effort.

Shultz echoes sentiments offered by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft who has stated that the US-Cuba embargo makes no sense in foreign policy terms.

Shultz's views are not exactly new as he said that American sanctions against Cuba were "ridiculous" on the Charlie Rose Show in April 2008. His comments were not as widely reported as they should have been at that time, however.

Shultz said:

I think our policy of sanctions against Cuba is ridiculous.

During the cold war it made sense because it was a Russian base. They used it for flying spying missions, and so on, but that's over. And all we do by our sanctions is allow Castro, and now maybe his brother, to blame the problems of Cuba on us.

And at the same time I think particularly now that there's some transitioning of some kind probably coming about, we're much more likely to get a constructive outcome if there's a lot of interaction. And to try to prevent interaction under these circumstances, I don't think is sensible.

-- former Secretary of State George Shultz interviewed by Charlie Rose, 4/24/08

President Barack Obama invited George Shultz two weeks ago to join him along with Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn to observe Obama chairing a Security Council Meeting at the United Nations on the subject of nuclear non-proliferation and arms control.

I watched President Obama greet Shultz and the other world leaders and special guests -- and it was obvious to me sitting in that chamber that President Obama connected with George Shultz and valued his presence that day.

The Obama national security team should take stock of George Shultz's views on the only part of the Cold War that managed to get colder during the Bush administration and do much more to thaw the ice in this hemisphere.

The US-Cuba embargo undermines America's position in the world. Everyone knows this. Barack Obama knows this.

There will be a vote in a couple of weeks in the United Nations that has practically become ritual. About 185 nations will vote against the US, Israel, and one or two of our island protectorates on the US embargo of Cuba.

It's time to end America's isolation on this anachronistic stand that mattered perhaps in the 1960s, if then, but definitely is "ridiculous" today.

-- Steve Clemons

(photo: Matthew Waxman, Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and Christian Brose; photo credit: Steve Clemons)

My good friend and occasional intellectual jousting mate, Christian Brose, is leaving Foreign Policy magazine and becoming Senator John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser. This is terrible news for Foreign Policy as Brose was a walking hybrid of progressive realism and liberal interventionism.

Christian Brose is a brilliant idea-smith who also happens to be great with words. As the Washington Post once noted, as the youngest member of Condoleezza Rice's speech writing team, he found her voice better than others -- and that voice involved foreign policy components of realism and idealism. One of the great attributes of Brose is his ability to really hear all sides of an issue and to wrestle with them on their merits. He has always been open to my own thinking and policy prognostications both when at the Department of State and at Foreign Policy -- even when I was not in territory that was mainstream and comfortable.

McCain made an excellent choice in Brose, and as folks who follow me on Twitter know -- I have been impressed with Senator McCain's track back to common sense/straight talk politicking recently.

And on another front, Barack Obama has chosen another great friend from my past, David Huebner, who was both a neighbor and colleague of mine in Asia matters in Southern California in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

Huebner will be Barack Obama's first gay Ambassadorial appointment (hopefully there will be more). David Huebner who has been active for decades in the Asia Pacific arena will become the next US Ambassador to New Zealand.

Huebner has also been an active human rights and anti-discrimination advocate for years. I remember when he went on to the board of Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and motivated many, including me, to become more publicly engaged in gay and lesbian policy issues. Huebner and a few other of my friends did this when it was not yet "safe" for some in conservative professional circles to do so. His leadership really changed my course.

I appeared in the movie Outrage, produced and directed by the Academy Award-nominated Kirby Dick, which appeared the other night on HBO and which is available through Netflix and the like.

I would not have "come out" without friends like David Huebner who were a key part of my support group when I was running one of the more established non-profit organizations in Southern California.

This news leaked out through the intrepid reporting of Kerry Eleveld, White House correspondent for The Advocate, and this news from the administration just days before President Obama speaks to the annual gala dinner of the Human Rights Campaign.

-- Steve Clemons

Center for a New American Security Senior Fellow Robert Kaplan has an excellent op-ed in today's New York Times that offers a balanced assessment of the regional and great power dimensions of the United States' involvement in Afghanistan.

As Steve Clemons and Steve Coll have noted in recent weeks, the debate over what strategy to pursue in Afghanistan is not simply a choice about the future of our involvement in that country, but a much broader question about the future of South Asia, which has major implications for all of the world's major powers.

He points out that China and Russia are essentially free-riding on the stability and economic benefits that the United States' military involvement in Afghanistan brings.

From the article:

In Afghanistan, American and Chinese interests converge. By exploiting Afghanistan's metal and mineral reserves, China can provide thousands of Afghans with jobs, thus generating tax revenues to help stabilize a tottering Kabul government. Just as America has a vision of a modestly stable Afghanistan that will no longer be a haven for extremists, China has a vision of Afghanistan as a secure conduit for roads and energy pipelines that will bring natural resources from the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. So if America defeats Al Qaeda and the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban, China's geopolitical position will be enhanced.

This is not a paradox, since China need not be our future adversary. Indeed, combining forces with China in Afghanistan might even improve the relationship between Washington and Beijing. The problem is that while America is sacrificing its blood and treasure, the Chinese will reap the benefits. The whole direction of America's military and diplomatic effort is toward an exit strategy, whereas the Chinese hope to stay and profit.

Kaplan questions the wisdom of a sustained military involvement and warns that "this is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions."

(Photo Credit: White House Photostream)

-- Ben Katcher

(Photo Credit: White House)

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are insisting that if only Congress could dream up better and more effective sanctions to squeeze Iran and get Russia and China to go along, then the Iranian nuclear problem would go away.

This is nonsense. Even if we are to put aside the extreme unlikelihood that either China or Russia would jeopardize their relations with Iran to support "crippling" American-led sanctions, the fact remains that the Iranians have simply staked too much of their political legitimacy on their nuclear program, and have reached a point of no return.

As Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett explain in Politico today:

Based on conversations with senior Iranian officials under the reformist Khatami and conservative Ahmadinejad administrations, we are convinced that no Iranian government with any popular legitimacy will agree to abandon enrichment inside Iran. Furthermore, no Iranian government will agree to "suspend," or otherwise seriously limit, enrichment activities as a confidence-building measure. The Khatami government did this from 2003 to 2005 and got nothing in return. In contrast, by continuing to develop Iran's enrichment capabilities, Ahmadinejad has created "cards" to play with the international community: e.g., proposing to send LEU abroad for value-adding additional processing.

The best that threatening and implementing sanctions can do is to kick the nuclear issue down the road while worsening the already abysmal relations between the United States and the most powerful country in the Middle East.

Rather than waving hollow sticks, the Obama administration should seek a wide-ranging, game-changing agreement with the Iranians that goes beyond nuclear issues and addresses both the United States' and Iran's core security interests.

As the Leveretts point out in their piece, "the key questions for Obama are: What is the "grand bargain" he is prepared to propose for Iran, and does he have the political nerve to prepare the American public for what that entails?

-- Ben Katcher

Today, Barack Obama is spending nearly all of his day in briefings related to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While many Members of Congress are invited to the briefings, you and I are not.

But for those in New York, you can see Patrick Lang, Ralph Peters and me debate my boss, Steve Coll -- author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 that Barack Obama has been reading for about eleven months (really. . .11 months??), John Nagl and James Shinn.

That's right, I am debating my boss -- but we plan to demonstrate what constructive discourse can look like. We can't speak for others on our respective teams, however.

The proposition we are going to wrestle with is too stark -- but that's the way debates are framed. The debate proposition is "AMERICA CANNOT AND WILL NOT SUCCEED IN AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN."

Binary choices are not the way the real world works in my view, but at least this debate tonight will help those of us on stage and others in the audience explicate what the big issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan are -- and are not.

Tonight's debate is sponsored by the Intelligence Squared Debates Series and will be at NYU. Info and ticket information here.

Unfortunately, the gratis tickets I was given are all spoken for now -- but folks can still purchase tickets if you are interested.

I will be posting links to National Public Radio and Bloomberg coverage of the debates in coming days.

-- Steve Clemons

(Riz Khan anchors the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English. This "Note" is part of a series of posts that personalities from Al Jazeera have been sharing with readers of The Washington Note.)

New York is going into rehab - to use an increasingly popular term.

The locals are finally recovering from the craziness of that week of United Nations General Assembly, Clinton Global Initiative, and a host of other events, such. The Global Creative Leadership Summit is one such gathering I particularly enjoy attending as it brings together not only leading political figures, but also a host of great minds from the worlds of science, business and the arts, in the hope of putting a fresh perspective on some of the issues facing the world today.

Cynics say that the UNGA doesn't really achieve much - except give some of the more eccentric or less-favoured world leaders a chance to rock the boat - as in the case of the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadaffi, who put on quite a show this year.

The gathering does, however, create a unique opportunity for "bi-lateral" meetings, where countries that don't often meet in obvious public situations get to sit down and do some serious talking. The results of these bi-lateral and side-line meetings usually take some time to make it to the media - by which time they seem to have no connection to the circus in New York.

The Obama administration is certainly taking a different approach to foreign policy from the preceding Bush administration - with the idea that engagement could work better with countries such as Iran, North Korea and Myanmar (formerly Burma).

But not everyone is convinced President Obama is on the right path. His recent plan to scrap the multi-billion dollar missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic had his critics jumping up and down, claiming he had crumbled under pressure from an angry Russia. Pragmatists say it is a far less simple explanation than that.

Either way, whether or not the Obama administration can manage a path of pro-active engagement hand-in-hand with allies - versus a lonely unilateral march across the globe will be something to look out for in the coming weeks and months.

At Al Jazeera English, we are constantly looking to highlight international issues and cover parts of the world that are often neglected by others.

While the UNGA is now over, we'll continue to examine the constantly changing relationships around the world at a political, business and social level... and always welcome direct input from our viewers across the globe.

We hope you can tune in and participate in this global conversation.

In the DC area, Al Jazeera English is available on Comcast channel 275, Cox channel 474, and Verizon FIOS channel 457, and anyone can catch us 24/7 streaming live and for free at www.livestation.com/aje. If you don't have AJE on your TV and want to send a note to your cable or satellite provider in the US or Canada to carry AJE, or just want to find out more about AJE, I encourage you to head to www.iwantaje.net.

Thanks again to Steve for letting me write a few short notes on his site during what was a crazy yet exciting experience in New York. And thank you for all your feedback, I look forward to speaking to you again.

-- Riz Khan

Cherie Blair, Founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, was kind enough to give me a few minutes at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative to talk about her partnership with Hani Masri and the Tomorrow's Youth Organization in Nablus, Palestine.

Blair and Masri have teamed up to help provide women who move beyond the educational program of TYO with support and counseling to start their own businesses and to pursue other economic opportuinities.

Former President Bill Clinton highlighted this partnership and the work they were doing as part of the stakeholder commitments in a viable Palestine that have to happen if there is going to be any alternative future there.

As Masri told me in an interview that I will soon be posting, Palestinians can't wait for the Israelis to stop the humiliation of the Occupation, or for the politicians and George Mitchell to succeed, to improve their condition.

I realize that the visual quality of the video is not what it should be -- but bad lighting and inexperience of this blogger with the camera are to blame. I still think that the message is important and should be heard. I'll be posting the Hani Masri video soon.

These interviews were part of a project sponsored by the new blog, The Palestine Note.

-- Steve Clemons

This in from a friend:

Theresa Poulson, one of the NJ.com reporters was covering a conservative event here in D.C. today in which Michael Steele, GOP chairman, was the featured speaker.

She was the only reporter there. Steele interrupted his speech to announce that Chicago had lost and Rio had won the 2016 Olympics.

The entire audience erupted in applause and cheers. Then, when Steele announced that Chicago had lost on the first round, the crowd went even wilder, cheering and whooping it up that America had lost the Olympics.

These people are sicko.

This pretty much assures that Chicago, and perhaps Illinois is going to tilt even more Democratic. Bad move Michael.

-- Steve Clemons

I had an excellent discussion with former German Green Party Chairman and new European Parliament Member Reinhard Bütikofer and his European Parliament colleague Claude Turmes this past week on what Europe was expecting from the US and President Obama at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference.

A short exchange is posted above. A longer program that I moderated at the New America Foundation can be viewed here.

-- Steve Clemons

Congressman Aaron Schock is a highly reasonable, intelligent, balanced Republican Member of Congress -- and though I have only met him twice, I was impressed with how he conducted his conversations and views in DC cocktail policy chatter -- particularly at an MSNBC party where Rachel Maddow was tending the bar.

Yesterday, Schock was on my mind as I listened intently to Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain lay out the parameters of what reasonable governance would look like from a responsible, conservative perch -- and was impressed with Senator McCain's repeated statements that he wanted to help President Obama succeed -- and would differ from him in some areas -- but would be solidly with him on others.

Lindsey Graham said that "Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, is not a Muslim, and is a good man -- and those that are saying otherwise are just 'crazy'." Graham went on to say that he also meant no insult to Muslims in any way and that if Obama was a Muslim, he would still support him; he just wanted to make it clear that there is nothing sane about arguing that President Obama is not in line with his self-proclaimed faith of Christianity.

These two Senators were speaking at the powerhouse conference titled "First Draft of History" sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, Newseum, and Aspen Institute -- and hearing them made me think of Aaron Schock who may be the Republican Party's best chance reviving a kind of reasonable, pragmatic leadership among its youngest and most effective Members. Schock is now the youngest member of the US House of Representatives.

But I was disheartened to learn that he has agreed to go today with Senator Jim DeMint down to investigate the Honduras situation.

Wait, strike that.

Schock may be doing real investigating -- while Senator DeMint is siding with others in a foreign government -- a coup-installed government -- against the Government of the United States. He is working hard there as an elected US government official to actively undermine American policy.

I suspect that Congressman Schock is going down to check out what is real and what is not in the mess of the Honduras coup and its aftermath -- but Jim DeMint is going down to "meddle" in the situation and to encourage the coup leaders to stand strong against the White House and the US Department of State.

Senator DeMint has behaved from the beginning as if he has a dog in the race down in Honduras, and it is not the one that the US government feels comfortable supporting at the moment. None of Honduras' neighbors do either.

It is extremely rare that a Chairman of a Committee on which a US Senator works would move to block a resource allocation that would allow that Member to fly somewhere within the jurisdiction of that Committee -- but Senator John Kerry blocked DeMint's plans to go and commiserate with wealthy businessmen who had recently had visas revoked by the US government and to encourage them to stand strong against the US government.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell intervened and arranged a Department of Defense secured plane to take the Senator and several House Members to Honduras -- thus reversing John Kerry's action.

I am currently looking into how exactly Senator McConnell secured agreement from the Department of Defense, part of the Obama-controlled Executive Branch, to provide the plane.

Senator John Kerry's rationale for rejecting Jim DeMint's request for resources for the Honduras trip was that DeMint has blocked consideration of two key Obama Latin America foreign policy appointments.

One of these is the current Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon is the President's pick to serve as US Ambassador to Brazil -- and the other is Georgetown Professor Arturo Valenzuela who is slated to succeed Shannon as Assistant Secretary for the same region.

DeMint has argued quite transparently on his Senate website and from the floor of the Senate Chamber that he believes that the real democrats in Honduras or the ones that through out the ousted President Manuel Zelaya, who has snuck back into Honduras and is sleeping on a couch inside the Brazilian Embassy.

Many think that Zelaya over-reached in his role as President and tried to force the extension of his term and powers in extra-constitutional ways. The Honduran Supreme Court ruled against Zelaya's course -- but a military coup that expelled the President is also extra-legal, and received condemnation from the entire raft of Latin American neighbors and the United States.

One informed Latin America policy expert confided that despite all of this, the Obama team handled badly the Honduras coup, and should have had this issue resolved in a week. But this person confidentially stated that there is a lack of depth on the President's team -- crippled by the complicating factor that Assistant Secretary Shannon is keeping quiet during his confirmation purgatory -- and there is no successor in his role because of DeMint's block.

But the story is bigger than Obama appointees.

DeMint seems to be focused on undermining US government policy by commiserating with foreign nationals abroad.

I respect Senator DeMint's right to speak his mind and conscience from the floor of the Senate, on his blog, on twitter, wherever he likes -- but there is something extremely wrong about a US Senator conspiring with government officials of another nation as well as wealthy supporters of a coup against the applied policies of the United States.

Jim DeMint made the decision to go to Honduras just as de facto Honduran president Roberto Micheletti began to issue signals that he was willing to work out an arrangement on the ousted President and to negotiate something with the United States and other regional stakeholders.

Aaron Schock should learn what he can but he needs to be careful of jumping on any bandwagons.

I'll never forget when former US Senator Fred Thompson was on a trip to Malaysia sponsored by a Senate-cleared non-profit foundation, but once there -- Thompson felt extremely uncomfortable with the tone of the meetings and the way the political views of the delegation were being co-opted by the hosts and by the Malaysian government and business officials Thompson and others were meeting.

Thompson bluntly said, "This doesn't feel right." And then he got up, picked up his materials, and flew immediately back to the United States.

Congressman Schock is someone Independents, Republicans and open-minded Dems should want to get to know in future years -- so this post is meant to encourage him to keep his powder dry.

Agitating against US government policy while abroad is not a career-booster in either political party.

-- Steve Clemons

More Information: On September 24th, Congressman Schock made these recommendations about how to resolve the crisis in Honduras:

1. Resuming US aid, international aid and ending the VISA sanctions.

2. Cooperating with the Honduran government by sending normal election observers to ensure the fairness of the regularly scheduled November election and recognizing the legitimacy of that election, so long as it is conducted in a fair and accurate manner.

3. While the Library of Congress report found the removal from power of former President Zelaya legal and constitutional, they also found Zelaya's removal from the country to be explicitly unconstitutional. Schock is calling for the Honduran government to allow Zelaya out of the Brazilian Embassy, recognize that his punishment for what led to his removal from power IS his removal from power, drop plans to prosecute him and issue a general amnesty for everyone involved in his removal from power. As a private citizen, Zelaya would have the right to campaign for his choice in the upcoming presidential election. However if he resorts to the incitement of violence, or advocates the violent overthrow of the Honduran government, then he should be arrested and put on trial as the government would do with any other citizen.

-- Steve Clemons

Rio de Janeiro! The International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded Brazil the honor (and burden) of hosting the 2016 Olympics. Despite strong pitches from three heavyweight cities, Madrid, Chicago, and Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro won the bid.

The Olympic Games will be held in South America for the first time in the long history of the games. While all of South America will celebrate this decision as a win for the entire continent, make no mistake, this is Brazil's time to shine.

Brazil has taken the World stage by storm in recent years and the IOC's decision serves as another affirmation that Brazil is truly a global heavyweight. Their role as one of the world's strongest emerging economies has provided them significant influence in both the North and the South.

Brazil is a driving force in the G20; the recent news that the G20 will replace the G8 as the primary economic council of wealthy nations can be attributed to the hard work of President Lula da Silva of Brazil. Brazil is also the likely choice for a permanent seat on an expanded UN Security Council, which would certainly solidify their place in the World.

On the economic front, Brazil has a rapidly developing and diverse economy. The IMF reported just this week that Brazil is set to lead the rest of Latin America out of the recession. The country's economy reported a 1.9% growth in the second quarter this year, effectively making them the first in Latin America, and one of the first G20 nations, to emerge from the recession.

While Brazil's efforts to be recognized by the world as an important player are finally coming to fruition, they have yet to fully take on the responsibility that comes along with the recognition. In an event at the New America Foundation yesterday, former Foreign Minister of Mexico, Jorge Castaneda, stated that Brazil, "wants to be present, but doesn't want to take sides" on important regional and international issues.

President Lula de Silva wants to be Latin America's diplomatic leader, but he allows Hugo Chavez of Venezuela to outshout him on regional matters. Castaneda offered an excellent analysis of the steps Brazil must take to become a responsible leader. I think it's just a matter of time before Brazil finds its voice and their sense of responsibility catches up with their popularity.

Congratulations Brazil!

-- Faith Smith

The International Olympic Committee has just voted that Chicago has been eliminated from consideration as the 2016 host for the Olympic Games.

An end to the Obama effect?

In about an hour you can watch the announcement live of the 2016 host here. I'm betting on Rio.

-- Steve Clemons

There is a great meeting going on right now in Washington sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, the Aspen Institute and the Newseum. The meeting is called "First Draft of History."

Yesterday, speakers included Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, White House senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, General David Petraeus, and others.

I am going to post the live feed up above for those interested in following the balance of the excellent program left today.

Here is what we have today:

9:00 am
Steve Schmidt, Former McCain Strategist
Robert Shrum, Democratic Strategist
Interviewed by John King

9:40 am
Alan Greenspan, Former Chairman, Federal Reserve
Interviewed by David Leonhardt

10:15 am
Jeff Bewkes
Chairman and CEO, Time Warner
Interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg

10:55 am
Carol Browner, White House Energy Czar
Interviewed by Ron Brownstein

11:35 am
Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark
Interviewed by Norah O'Donnell

12:00 pm
Lawrence Summers, National Economic Council Director
Interviewed by Maria Bartiromo

12:40 pm
Brian Schweitzer, Governor of Montana
Interviewed by Jacob Weisberg

1:45 pm
University Presidents Panel
Moderated by Howard Fineman
Panelists:
Drew Gilpin Faust, President, Harvard University
John Sexton, President, New York University
Ruth Simmons, President, Brown University
Shirley M. Tilghman, President, Princeton University

2:15 pm
Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
Interviewed by James Fallows

3:15 pm
Media Panel
Moderated by Margaret Carlson
Panelists: Eugene Robinson and Walter Isaacson

-- Steve Clemons