Obama@WH. NYT: Obama's supersecret new e-mail address: "It is now the ultimate status symbol in a town obsessed by status." Biden has it, but the Obama campaign's national security advisor Tony Lake and Nancy Pelosi do not. "Mr. Obama joked about the exclusive nature of his e-mail list at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington on Saturday night. 'How exclusive?' the president asked. 'Everyone look at the person sitting on your left. Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my e-mail address.'”

WP: New book by former top CIA Iraq weapons hunter Charles Duelfer released, after nine month delay by CIA publication review board.

NYT: Israeli Advocacy Group Begins Campaign to Help Palestinians Sue Over Settlements.

Bloomberg's Ryan Donmoyer: Richest Americans’ Income Doubled as Tax Rate Slashed:

The average tax rate paid by the richest 400 Americans fell by a third to 17.2 percent through the first six years of the Bush administration and their average income doubled to $263.3 million, new IRS data show.

The 17.2 percent tax rate in 2006 was the lowest since the IRS began tracking the 400 largest taxpayers in 1992, although the richest 400 Americans paid more tax on an inflation-adjusted basis than any year since 2000.

WP: "Thomas A. Daschle, nominated to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, did not pay more than $128,000 in taxes over three years, a revelation that poses a potential obstacle to his Senate confirmation."

NYT in Davos:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey walked off the stage after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, during a panel discussion on Gaza at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, vowing never to return to the annual gathering.

Mr. Erdogan apparently became incensed after the moderator curtailed his response to remarks by Mr. Peres on the recent Israeli military campaign. The panel was running late, and Mr. Peres was to have had the last word, participants said.

Panel discussions at Davos are restricted to one hour, but Mr. Erdogan insisted on responding to Mr. Peres. Red-faced, and with one hand grasping the arm of the moderator, the columnist David Ignatius of The Washington Post, Mr. Erdogan turned to the Israeli president. ...

Samantha Power to NSC.

NYT: Jailed C.I.A. Mole Kept Spying for Russia, U.S. Says.

Anthony Fenton on the freedom agenda and nspd 58.

From Foreign Policy: Recent U.S.-Iran nuclear talks involved key officials:

Over the past year, our sources confirmed, former Defense Secretary William Perry and a group of high-level U.S. nuclear nonproliferation specialists and U.S. experts on Iran held a series of meetings in European cities with Iranian officials under the auspices of the Pugwash group. (Pugwash, a group founded in 1957 by an international group of scientists, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for advocating for the elimination of nuclear weapons.) Perry served as a member of the Obama campaign's national security working group.

Sources familiar with the meetings suggest they may be coming to light now via deliberate leaks to the Iranian media, by jockeying Iranian political power players trying to maneuver for advantage amid a shifting Washington-Tehran dynamic and their own upcoming elections in June. Among the Iranian officials who attended the Pugwash dialogues, the Cable has learned, was Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the Iranian ambassador and permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, described Soltanieh as a technocrat whose presence at the Pugwash dialogue was significant. "He matters because when he writes these reports back to the regime, they will not be thrown in the trash," Clawson said. "They will be looked at." [...]

Along with reports that the State Department is drafting a letter to the Iranian leadership and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice's comments this week that the United States will pursue direct diplomacy with Iran, the Obama administration is undertaking an intensive policy review toward Iran even as it gets its new team members into place.

"I am seeing actions that seem to be really quite different," says Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, a Washington group that promotes U.S. engagement with Iran. "Obama was not president for even 20 minutes when he said ‘mutual respect.' That is an Iranian buzz word. No one in the Middle East uses that more than Iran." ...

TPM's Justin Elliott: Surprising Pentagon office of net assessment report writer. "Mylroie wrote reports about Iraq for the Pentagon as recently as 2007."

Maybe not Ross as Iran envoy? A contact says that "CSIS's Jon Alterman told listeners to a BBC radio talk show Thursday that his sources within the Administration indicate that Ross is NOT going to be named special envoy to Iran."

Steve Coll on "how to save newspapers."

Eli Valley with his comics the "Shonda" in the Forward.

Politico: a mid-week White House cocktail party?

Coming from what seems a somewhat hawkish Republican point of view, former chairman of the House intelligence committee Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) often has a somewhat funny, unintended way of making an argument perhaps more useful to the other side. (As he did in the past on the Bush administration not consulting with Congress on North Korea and Syria). And now, on Iran, where he seems to be making the argument, via Israeli paper Ha'aretz, that it's too late to do anything about Iran's nuclear program. "There's no way and no chance to stop the Iranian nuclear program." The implication being, seemingly, take as much time as you need, diplomats, to try clean up a fait accompli?

In Ha'aretz piece on Mitchell's mideast trip, this interesting too:

After completing his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Mitchell will depart for Amman.

In addition to being one of the issues Mitchell plans to discuss, arms smuggling in Gaza is also on the agenda in Washington, Cairo and several European capitals.

Barak was scheduled to travel to Washington Wednesday night for talks with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on arms smuggling, and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana arrived in Israel for talks Tuesday, after discussing the issue with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit in Cairo Tuesday. Aboul Gheit warned the Europeans against sending a flotilla of ships to counter smuggling off the coast of Gaza.

"You must understand Arab and Muslim feelings," he said. "I urge you to look and consider this ... because it might have consequences in Palestinian and Arab relations with you."

The Egyptian minister said Israel, not Europe, should undertake the effort to stop the smuggling.

The Foreign Ministry began intensive talks this week with a number of European countries over how to deal with weapons smuggling. The ministry created a special team to deal with the smuggling issue, headed by Yaakov Hadas, its deputy director general of the Middle East and peace process division. This week Hadas and ministry deputy director general Yossi Gal will fly to London to discuss a British proposal to deploy naval vessels to monitor the smuggling routes to the Gaza Strip as well as the exchange of intelligence regarding smuggling.

The ministry's deputy director general for Western Europe, Rafi Barak, is to set off for Paris, Berlin, Rome, Copenhagen, Madrid and The Hague to discuss ways in which the countries could help stop the smuggling. France has already announced it will deploy a frigate in the Red Sea to monitor shipping routes. Italy has offered satellite equipment to locate underground tunnels, and Germany is willing to send engineering experts to Egypt.

Politico: "Obama's War on K Street means a host of former members will now have to feed the meter. As of Tuesday, all former representatives who are registered lobbyists have lost their House parking privileges."

FP: Vali Nasr to advise Holbrooke.

CJR's Kate Klonick interviews former McCain blogger Michael Goldfarb about the campaign.

Kori Schake:

What is needed is a wholesale rethinking of how we organize, train, and equip our diplomats and how we connect them to the President’s priorities. Does anyone really think we have enough diplomats for the people-intensive tasks of winning the war of ideas? How about advancing democracy? Strengthening civil society? Showing people in societies threatened by globalization the power of America’s creed of opportunity and self-reliance? There are more than 200 cities in the world with populations over a million people that have no U.S. diplomatic representation at all.

Beyond the baseline numbers, we don’t train our diplomats in anything except languages. In the course of a military career, a top officer spends about seven years being educated for the expanded responsibilities their subsequent jobs entail –- that’s in addition to the training for their current job that is part and parcel of their routine work. A comparably senior diplomat will have had less than a year. That our diplomats are as admirably capable as they are is a tribute to their individual excellence. [...]

I've worked in both Defense and State, and the difference money makes on the culture just screams out at you. The State Department feels itself lucky to send people to the National War College –- they’ve been living on small budgets for such a long time they can’t even envision a world in which our country has a National Diplomatic University that teaches statecraft and our military pleads for admission to gain that essential education. State’s culture is one of doing the best you can with inadequate resources.

While Congress is frequently vilified for stinginess toward the State Department, they mostly meddle in foreign assistance accounts, not the baseline budget. The White House almost always gets the money requested in the President’s budget. The President should ask for money, and lots of it, to bring our non-military national security departments up to the standard our military performs at. ...

Spearheaded by Eric Martin of American Footprints and Robert Wright, of BloggingheadsTv fame, the Progressive Realist debuts. Here's an explanation of what the new foreign policy aggregator site is about. Among the feeder sites for it: Matt Yglesias, Steve Clemons, Duck of Minerva, Democracy Arsenal, Tapped, James Fallows, Fistful of Euros and Matt Duss.

Spencer Ackerman:

Most importantly, Gates [at his confirmation hearing today] provided a series of warnings that might help shape the ways in which the Obama administration takes charge of the Afghanistan war. The most immediate issue facing the administration on the war is whether to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan ... In December, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, stated that he needs an increase of nearly 30,000 troops “for the next few years” — in other words, a sustained troop increase, not a brief surge in U.S. forces as occurred in Iraq in 2007. In the last few days Obama administration officials have begun telling reporters off the record not to presume that the president has made a decision on the size or duration of any prospective troop increase.

Gates said Tuesday that he backs McKiernan’s request — but signaled that the troop spigot would not remain open. “I would be very skeptical about additional force levels beyond what Gen. McKiernan asked for,” Gates told the Senate panel. A former senior CIA official during the Russian invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Gates recalled that “the Soviets couldn’t win that war with 120,000 troops and a ruthless approach” to Afghan civilians, since they adopted “the wrong strategy.”

While not exactly spelling out what the right strategy for Afghanistan would be, Gates went further than any Obama official has to date in sketching what such an approach might look like. “Above all,” he said, “there must be an Afghan face on this war." ...

President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.

Among those pressing for Mr. Karzai to do more, the officials said, are Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The officials portrayed the approach as a departure from that of President Bush, who held videoconferences with Mr. Karzai every two weeks and sought to emphasize the American role in rebuilding Afghanistan and its civil institutions.

A few more appointment names.

"Hailed," "courageous," "warm," "friendly." Al Kamen:

With Obama winning soaring approval ratings around the world, foreign leaders can only hope to catch a little of his pixie dust, our colleague Glenn Kessler reports. After all, their own approval ratings are down somewhere around 50 percent, while Obama's are sky-high. So it only can help to show you are working closely with the world's most popular politician. (Bush's approval ratings overseas, by contrast, were most always lower than those of any local leader, so helping him could only hurt you.)

Case in point: the pro forma announcements of presidential phone calls. Obama called both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday, and the overseas accounts of those calls is far more laudatory and more detailed than such missives released during the Bush presidency, using words such as "hailed," "courageous," "warm," "friendly" and "trust." The effusive French news release noted the "warm conversation, which lasted half an hour," and the German release, which didn't have a precise length of the chat, noted that it was "in-depth."

Jeet Heer: John Updike, RIP.

More.

Updike's short story archive from the New Yorker.

NYT literary remembrance (61 books, plus a few hundred book reviews, essays, and short stories) here.

Obama interviewed by Al Arabiya's Hisham Melham.

John Harris: Power, politics gossip in daily Carville-Emanuel-Stephanopoulos-Begala call. "According to Begala, the expectation of a daily call is so great that Emanuel will sometimes call him and shout impatiently, 'I can’t talk right now!' and then hang up."

Haaretz Avi Isaacharoff and Amos Harel analysis: Recognizing that Israel's effort to topple Hamas has failed.

Marc Lynch: How badly did Gaza poison the well? Five ways.

Marc Ambinder: E-mail meltdown at the White House. "Maybe that's why Robert Gibbs won't return your e-mails -- actually, that's not why he won't return your e-mails, but at least now he has an excuse." Thank goodness Obama has his Blackberry.

From me at Foreign Policy: India's special envoy anxiety, part II:

At an off-the-record Aspen Strategy Group meeting held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C. in early December, a high-level delegation from India told American foreign policy experts -- including three officials who were part of the formal Obama transition team -- that India might preemptively make Richard Holbrooke persona non grata if his South Asia envoy mandate officially included India or Kashmir, people familiar with the meeting said.

Among the Obama transition figures who attended the meeting, held as part of the Aspen Institute's U.S. India Strategic Dialogue: former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig; Kurt Campbell, the director of the Aspen Strategy Group who is expected to be named assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs; and former Pentagon official Ashton Carter, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Such foreign-policy events occur throughout the city every week, of course, and it's certainly no surprise that top foreign-policy hands, including some who advised President Obama's campaign and his transition, were included.

But Obama administration officials have insisted to Foreign Policy that the Obama transition held no meetings with foreign governments or representatives of foreign governments at all during the transition. "The transition met with no foreign governments and no representatives of foreign governments pursuant to a policy laid out by the then President-Elect," one administration official said by e-mail. What's more, he said, in effect, they did not have to be influenced to exclude India from Holbrooke's official mission, because it was "not contemplated" for the South Asia envoy's portfolio to have an Indian role. [...]

And while the Obama transition may not have met with any foreign governments or representatives of foreign governments in any official capacity, foreign governments including India's did try to influence the future administration's policy decisions by working the phones, meeting with Obama transition figures at the margins of conferences, at Washington receptions, and through third parties.

"The message was clearly conveyed by India to the Transition and received," The Cable was told. "It led to a change in how Richard Holbrooke's mission was publicly described and unveiled." ...

Update: More from Ben Smith. "The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Holbrooke's job definition wasn't changed by Indian lobbying. Indeed, the Obama aide said, he and the other people involving in defining the envoy's job weren't even aware of the lobbying."

Spencer Ackerman: "Even before President Barack Obama took the oath of office Tuesday, a coalition of progressives assembled to steer him away from his long-discussed plans to increase the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan by nearly 30,000. ... The Obama administration has no shortage of military and strategy reviews for the Afghanistan war. At her confirmation hearing last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged that the administration would conduct a broad-brush review of what the goals of U.S. policy are in Afghanistan. A spokesman for the National Security Council, Benjamin Chang, said it was unclear what the timetable was for that review to proceed. The administration will also inherit highly anticipated military reviews are underway from Gen. David Petraeus, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia; Gen. Douglas Lute, the so-called White House 'war czar' responsible for coordinating government-wide policies in Iraq and Afghanistan; and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Ben Smith: Bush's legal foes now Obama's legal team.

Politico: Clinton names special envoy on climate change. "Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday will name Todd D. Stern, a trusted top aide in her husband’s White House, to serve as a special envoy for climate change, Democratic officials said. ... Stern was staff secretary, a sensitive job that makes him the gatekeeper to every piece of paper the President sees and signs. Also for Clinton, he was senior White House negotiator at the Kyoto and Buenos Aires climate negotiations." Via TPM.

Laura Secor reports in the New Yorker on a dissident economist's efforts to reform the Revolution in Iran. Though Mohammad Tabibian, Iran's foremost free-market economist, "is virtually unknown in the West," he is "one of the country's most important reformers. He was one of the economists chosen to shape the economic policy for the newly created Islamic Republic, in the early nineteen-eighties; his team's recommendations ... relied on 'the principles of competition, property, trade with the world, openness.' However, 'the debate over free markets goes just as deep' in Iranian public discourse as the battle over free speech."

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer interviews new White House counsel Gregory Craig about executive orders and what the CIA thought of them.

Karen Greenberg writes in the Post on Guantanamo's beginnings.

International trade lawyer Doug Jacobson describes interesting case of US seeking to prevent re-export of a US speedboat, "the Bladerunner," from South Africa to Iran.

WP: Guantanamo case files in disarray. "Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority. ... There have been indications from within and outside the government for some time ... that evidence and other materials on the Guantanamo prisoners were in disarray, even though most of the detainees have been held for years."

Mark Hosenball: "Publicly at least, President Obama has made a clean break with his predecessor's controversial counterterrorism policies, but in private the new administration is leaving itself some wiggle room. A day before Obama signed executive orders closing Guantánamo Bay and banning torture, the White House's top lawyer privately indicated to Congress that the new president reserved the right to ignore his own (and any other president's) executive orders. In a closed-door appearance before the Senate intelligence committee, White House counsel Gregory Craig was asked whether the president was required by law to follow executive orders. According to people familiar with his remarks, who asked for anonymity when discussing a private meeting, Craig answered that the administration did not believe he was. The implication: in a national-security crisis, Obama could deviate from his own rules. A White House official said that Craig's remarks were being 'mischaracterized.'"

Aram Roston and Paul Kiel at Pro publica: Bank Employing GOP House Leader Eric Cantor’s Wife Got Bailout Bucks.

HRC Book List. My colleague Carolyn O'Hara asks various foreign policy hands what book should be on HRC's reading list.

Just out from me at Foreign Policy: India's stealth lobbying against Holbrooke's brief.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- flanked by President Obama -- introduced Richard Holbrooke as the formidable new U.S. envoy to South Asia at a State Department ceremony on Thursday, India was noticeably absent from his title.

Holbrooke, the veteran negotiator of the Dayton accords and sharp-elbowed foreign policy hand who has long advised Clinton, was officially named "special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan" in what was meant to be one of the signature foreign policy acts of Obama's first week in office.

But the omission of India from his title, and from Clinton's official remarks introducing the new diplomatic push in the region was no accident -- not to mention a sharp departure from Obama's own previously stated approach of engaging India, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, in a regional dialogue. Multiple sources told The Cable that India vigorously -- and successfully -- lobbied the Obama transition team to make sure that neither India nor Kashmir was included in Holbrooke's official brief. ...

Politico's Ben Smith: U.S. Foreign Policy: Who's in Charge?

The Hill: Penn. defense firm, recipient of Murtha earmarks, raided by FBI:

Federal agents raided the offices of a Western Pennsylvania defense contractor that has received millions in federal earmarks at the request of Rep. John Murtha, according to local media reports.

The offices of Kuchera Industries and Kuchera Defense Systems were shuttered for the day following the raids, the chief financial officer told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. The companies' phone system says they will open again Friday morning, and e-mails sent to top company officials went unanswered.

Based in Windber, Pa., just outside Johnstown, Kuchera won $8.2 million in federal defense earmarks in the 2008 budget. The earmarks came at the request of Murtha (D-Pa.)....

Weekly Standard: "Cheney speaks out on Libby. Former vice president calls prosecution a 'serious miscarriage of justice' and disagrees with Bush's decision."

Just out from Columbia Journalism Review's new January/February issue: Hung out to dry: the national-security press dug up the dirt, but Congress wilted:

...Perhaps nothing is more demoralizing, though, than the sense that
journalism's most groundbreaking investigations did not yield the kind
of public accountability, congressional investigations, and reform
that past eras have seen—that the system of democratic checks and
balances, of which the press is only one part, is broken. Most of the
abuses of the last eight years were pursued and exposed not by
Congress, but by the press. "I have found that the stories which most
anger and haunt journalists are not necessarily the ones with the most
violence," says Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart
Center for Journalism & Trauma. "They are the stories in which we felt
our intervention to have accomplished nothing. What's really striking
with the Risen story is precisely that sense of powerlessness: they
committed this great act of journalism, and broke a story of a
violation of federal law that raises fundamental questions about
abuses of power in our society. And then the great institutions of
society don't respond, but instead turn around and say, 'Fuck you.'
That is a huge invalidation of all the work, and further betrayal of
our sense as journalists of what's right."

The system did not work, and is still not working. When the stories on
black-site prisons and domestic wiretapping broke in late 2005, the
Democrats were still a minority in Congress, and Republicans largely
protected the administration from scrutiny. But even after the
Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm
elections, their interest in high-profile investigations of
controversial administration behavior on the national-security front
remained muted. Part of the explanation, says Dana Priest, who wrote
the Post's CIA-prison story, is that the information in her piece and
the Times's NSA report is "all classified. For an informed member of
Congress, if they had a secret briefing and read my story, they are
still hamstrung from discussing it, because they had the secret
briefing." [...]

From Foreign Policy this morning: Diplomacy's back, NSC and Africa appointments, cat is out of the bag on Policy Planning, new SFRC GOP line up, and other news. Obama joins Hillary Clinton in addressing State Department employees this afternoon.

NYT: Obama to shut down foreign prisons and Guantanamo:

President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

The orders, which would be the first steps in undoing Bush-era detention policies, would rewrite American rules for the detention of terrorism suspects. They would require an immediate review of the 245 detainees still held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to determine if they should be transferred, released or prosecuted.

And the orders would bring to an end a Central Intelligence Agency program that kept terrorism suspects in secret custody for months or years, a practice that has brought fierce criticism from foreign governments and human rights activists. They will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said. ...

NYT: Caroline Kennedy said to withdraw from Senate bid.

From FP: Purple tunnel of doom after-action report:

... The moral is that the DC cops and inauguration committee folks screwed up," said a Washington foreign-policy hand on condition of anonymity who was caught in the tunnel for four hours and, like others, ended up missing the entire inauguration. "They knew exactly how many ticket holders there were. They knew people would show up early in massive numbers. They had months to prepare ... And their planning was clearly woefully inadequate and put thousands of people at risk of injury (not to mention, historic disappointment).

"It was kind of like ‘post-war' planning for Iraq," the foreign policy hand added. "It kinda happened on paper, but it wasn't any good." [...]

Several Washington vets also noted that their disappointment for themselves pales in comparison to their outrage on behalf of those in the crowd who had traveled from far away some with children at their own expense to see the historic occasion -- and missed out. "I'm talking about a father who makes $50,000 a year and somehow scored tickets and brought his two children to witness this historic moment, and then got turned away, even though they had tickets!" Tomasky writes. "This is a disgrace and should outrage people."

"I'm disappointed, but can you imagine flying across the country to attend this with your family and then being turned away, unable to even get to a television in time?" Scoblic e-mailed. ...

WP: Iraq accuses MEK of planning suicide attack on Iraqi troops, "a possible prelude," the paper says, "to decisive government action to close the group's camp in Iraq and expel its members."

Several Obama cabinet members confirmed: Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security, Peter Orszag as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Kenneth Salazar as Secretary of the Interior, Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs and Thomas Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture.

Marc Lynch on the purple tunnel of doom. More from TNR's Peter Scoblic and the Post.

Obama sworn in before estimated crowd of two million.

From his inaugural address:

...As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. ...

WP: Obama will plunge into foreign policy. "As one of his first actions, Obama plans to name former senator George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) as his Middle East envoy, aides said, sending a signal that the new administration intends to move quickly to engage warring Israelis and Palestinians in efforts to secure the peace."

Colleagues say that former OLC official and Balkinization law blogger Marty Lederman is joining the Obama administration.

Update: Deputy assistant attorney general. Apparently John Yoo's old job.

From Foreign Policy: Last transition day names/jobs edition, with a lead-off on Korea.

Also, go read Daniel Markey, "Dear Mr. Holbrooke: So, you want to be a special envoy..."

Via Hilzoy and Americablog: Irony is dead, the Inauguration edition. "HBO has taken down the video of 'This Land Is Your Land' from yesterday, citing copyright infringement."

Ha'aretz's Zvi Barel: new strategic thinking needed:

But tomorrow Israel is getting a new American president - a president who has already explained to everyone that he prefers a new order over temporary arrangements. He is ready to turn a new page of dialogue with Iran; to reexamine U.S.-Syrian relations; to consider Iraq as a bitter episode from which it is best to exit quickly. ...

Obama is committed to Israel's security as Bush and Clinton were, but he may come to see the essence of such security in a different way. Peace, for example, may be seen by him as an essential component of Israel's security. This may be novel, and perhaps even revolutionary in Israeli eyes, but it had better prepare - not using lobbyists in Washington but by planning for constructive dialogue with its neighbors.

Israel, whose strategic choices bolstered the significance and threat posed by armed groups, will need to reevaluate its approach to the Saudi initiative. The safety belt it offers can dissolve the threats of these groups if Israel understands that they threaten the Arab states no less than they threaten it. Israel needs the Saudi initiative not because it needs Arab security, but because it needs to aspire to permanent arrangements with states, not with groups or gangs.

If Syria is the one influencing Hamas and Hezbollah, if Egypt's status is what determines the region's future, if Saudi Arabia is the counterweight against Iran, these are the partners with whom it is necessary to make a deal and not with their subcontractors. The Saudi initiative has still not expired, but neither have the threats. Without adopting a new strategy that will bolster the Saudi initiative, the war in the Gaza Strip will remain a successful episode and nothing more; a temporary arrangement until the next round.

NYT: Obama reaches out to McCain.

Military analyst Tom Donnelly at the Corner: "Larry Di Rita’s defense of his former bosses is a remarkable demonstration of the personal loyalty that made the Bush administration, and particularly the Bush Pentagon through 2006, what it was: a tight-knit, inward-looking group largely unable to entertain facts or ideas that did not fit into the world they had constructed for themselves. ..."
More from Tom Ricks.

U2 performing Pride at the concert at the Lincoln Memorial today, the holiday honoring Martin Luther King tomorrow, Obama's inauguration Tuesday. This evening, when the police motorcade and the guys clutching guns out of the SUVs flashed by on Connecticut Avenue, it was something to note it was "44" on the license plates.

Luers/Pickering/Walsh in NYRB: How to deal with Iran.

Black Money. Interesting NYT and other accounts of connections between Bernie Madoff, Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes. More here and here.

This from the Financial Times' John Dizard a couple weeks back, on Madoff and black money investors:

... Over the holidays, in New York and Palm Beach, I've been collecting string on the investors in the funds "managed" by the Noels and Mr Madoff. An interesting pattern of income and asset distribution emerges: in the past year or so, assuming the allegations against him are borne out, Mr Madoff appears to have in effect taken money from those reluctant to pay taxes or declare wealth and given it to the overleveraged. From the black to the red, you could say. ...

However, the onshore leveraged were not the only investors in Madoff. There were also offshore investors, some of whom I know. Mr Madoff and the Noels would not have needed to know all the details of the tax filings, or lack thereof, of these investors.

Since no readers of this column would be personally familiar with the logistics of laundering money, I will need to tell you that it is not that easy. You have to shift it through a tangle of accounts from, say, an under-invoiced exporter or over-invoiced importer to a distant money centre, to a tax haven, then split it up and send it to another tax haven, and so on. They give courses on this to legitimate bankers; it's called "layering" and "structuring".

Also, as I believe some people will discover, western governments' information gathering and analysis have improved, in part because there was a mistaken belief that gathering intelligence on terrorism could best be done by tracking bank accounts. (Kinship networks are more useful.)

Anyway, it can take a long time to build up a stash of hot money. Withdrawing that money, and redeploying it, also takes time and preparation: more time than a lot of the black money holders have had over the past year.
So I understand, both through logic and through reporting, that black money investors in poorly performing funds, or frauds, will have been hit harder than the overleveraged.

What recourse would black money investors have against managers who turn out to be frauds? (Here, of course, I am speaking in general terms, not about any manager or fund marketer in particular.) What if those black money investors are from places such as Colombia, where extra-legal means of enforcement and collection are more common? A cell in a fairly safe federal prison might look attractive compared with the sanctions imposed by informal justice systems.

Would you want to be someone who had defrauded some angry kingpin? Even if you "got away" with no successful prosecution? This topic has come up repeatedly over the past few weeks with bankers and fund marketers. The speculation is rather gruesome. ...

NYT: Tensions rise on Korean peninsula.

David Ignatius with departing US ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker's exit interview.

Gershom Gorenberg in Haaretz on Gaza and Obama. " ... We don't know if the Olmert-Livni-Barak triumvirate deliberately picked that window of opportunity. If so, it already looks like another of the war's mistakes - perhaps the only welcome miscalculation. For instead of preventing American involvement, their decision to go to war on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration may well force him to intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and push for a diplomatic solution."

Ray Bonner: "[Tariq] Ali and [Bruce] Riedel agree that the United States wants and needs a stable and democratic Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s called nation building. This is a laudable goal, of course, but is it achievable? Not, they say, unless the United States is prepared for a lengthy commitment. It cannot abandon the project halfway through as it did with Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Soviets were routed."

NYT: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel announced late Saturday night that the Israeli military would begin a unilateral cease-fire in Gaza within hours while negotiations continued on how to stop the resupply of Hamas through smuggling from Egypt."

WP:

More than 1,140 Palestinians, including about 500 women and children, have been killed in Gaza since the fighting began Dec. 27, according to Gazan health officials. Thirteen Israelis, including 10 soldiers, have died.

The stated goal of the Israeli offensive was to weaken, if not destroy, Hamas so that it could no longer launch missiles and unguided rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. Palestinian fighters have fired more than 7,000 of the rockets since 2005, according to the Israeli military, and their range and lethality have progressively improved.

Although Hamas absorbed heavy losses in manpower and materiel over the past three weeks, it never lost its capacity to launch strikes on Israel. On Saturday, Palestinian fighters aimed about two dozen missiles and rockets into Israel, including several that landed after Olmert's speech.

Update: NYT: Hamas agrees to one week ceasefire.

Politico: Obama courts Republicans. And the media. Politico's Michael Calderone: "It's quite a departure from the "who-needs-the-elite-media" posture taken shortly after the campaign."

More on the topic of resisting the bubble: Obama may keep Blackberry after all. "He's been resisting the advice of lawyers and others to give up the e-mail device upon taking office because he views it as his connection to the outside world." But no IM for Axelrod and other White House staffers.

FP's Blake Hounshell takes on Slate's Will Saletan, on how (not) to close Gaza tunnels. Blake: "What ever happened to basic economics? If people want stuff, and people are willing to supply it at the demanded price -- whether it's illegal drugs, weapons, or televisions -- they will find a way to supply it, and they will take extreme risks if the expected payoff exceeds their expected costs. Full stop."

More foreign policy names.

Gaza ceasefire should be announced shortly, media reports and a US official say.

Earlier, from Reuters: Israeli television broadcast desperate cries for help from a Palestinian doctor on Friday after his children were killed in an Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip and troops later helped surviving members of the family.

More from the NYT.

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Gazan and a doctor who has devoted his life to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

But on Saturday, the day after three of his daughters and a niece were killed by Israeli fire in Gaza, Dr. Abuelaish, 53, struggled to hold on to the humane philosophy that has guided his life and work.

As he sat in a waiting room of the Israeli hospital where he works part time, he asked over and over, “Why did they do this?” ...

“I dedicated my life really for peace, for medicine,” said Dr. Abuelaish, who does joint research projects with Israeli physicians and for years has worked as something of a one-man force to bring injured and ailing Gazans for treatment in Israel.

WP: Barack Obama offers some reassuring signals about his coming presidency in a visit to The Post.

It's 13 degrees.

100 Hours....

WP: Israel's Livni flies to Washington. "Just before midnight, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni unexpectedly flew to Washington, where she and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice were expected to sign an agreement on measures intended to stop Hamas from smuggling weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt, a critical Israeli demand. Meanwhile, Israeli officials said they were hopeful that an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire with Hamas was within reach."

NYT: Incredible and miraculous they all survived.

...Moments later, terrified passengers began swarming out the emergency exits into brutally cold air and onto the submerged wings of the bobbing jetliner, which began taking in water.

As the first ferry nudged up alongside, witnesses said, some passengers were able to leap onto the decks. Others were helped aboard by ferry crews. Soon, a small armada of police boats, fireboats, tugboats and Coast Guard craft converged on the scene, and some of them snubbed up to keep the jetliner afloat. Helicopters brought wet-suited police divers, who dropped into the water to help with the rescues.

Over the next hour, as a captivated city watched continuous television reports and the Hudson turned from gold to silver in the gathering winter twilight, all of the passengers, including at least one baby, and both pilots and all three flight attendants, were transferred to the rescue boats — a feat that unfolded as the white-and-blue jetliner continued to drift south. ...

Check out my Foreign Policy scoop: the secret foreign policy dinner Obama attended:

At a quiet dinner late last week in Washington's Ronald Reagan Building, President-elect Obama reached out to outside foreign-policy experts, trying to resist the presidential bubble that is rapidly closing around him.

Late afternoon last Thursday Jan.8, scholars and staff at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars noticed an unusual upgrade in the security of the top floors of their building, which also houses USAID, the EPA, a public food court, and some foreign television stations. The Wilson Center hosts high-level people all the time, but this security detail was of a different order, sources said.

And indeed, some suspected that Obama was coming to dine in the 8th-floor offices of Lee Hamilton, the quasi-governmental think tank's president -- a hunch they confirmed the next day.

Hamilton, the longtime House member from Indiana who cochaired the Iraq Study Group, the 9/11 Commission, and numerous others over the years, has become a kind of wise-man mentor to Obama. Last Thursday, the Wilson Center president assembled a small collection of scholars on the Middle East and South Asia for a meeting that stretched through dinner for hours into the night.

Among those who attended the off-the-record dinner: Iran scholar Haleh Esfandiari, Pakistan expert Ahmed Rashid (who had flown in from Lahore), Obama friend and foreign-policy advisor Samantha Power of Harvard University (who accompanied PEOTUS to the meeting), incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and a few others. Obama told the group, none of whom reached would discuss the details, that he already felt in the bubble and was trying his best to meet with independent experts. ...

Update: Ben Smith has more guests.

Obama at the Post. And pool reporter Helene Cooper from rival the New York Times none too happy: "After three and a half hours at his transition office, PEOTUS obama took another 6 minute ride through washington, arriving at 157 pm at the nondescript soviet-style building at 15th and L street that houses the washington post. Around 100 people--Post reporters perhaps?--awaited PEOTUS's arrival, cheering and bobbing their coffee cups. Pool is holding in a van outside, while Mr obama does his washington post interview, and will exercise enormous restraint by ending report before saying what really thinks about this turn of events."

EJ Dionne: Audacity without ideology.

...Obama has spent his adult life tilting left while courting conservatives. That's how he won his very first campaign, for president of the Harvard Law Review.

He has been known to call himself a "progressive," and when he occasionally uses the word "ideological" in reference to his own leanings, he clearly casts himself as somewhere left of center.

Yet most of his references to ideology are disdainful and dismissive. In discussing his economic stimulus package, he speaks of judging his proposals by how many jobs they produce and how quickly they will move the economy. Other criteria are inadmissible.

There are at least three keys to understanding Obama's approach to (and avoidance of) ideology. There is, first, his simple joy in testing himself against those who disagree with him. Someone who knows the president-elect well says that he likes talking with philosophical adversaries more than with allies. ...

NYT: Biden outlines plan to do more with less power.

AP:

Witnesses and United Nations officials say Israeli shells have struck the U.N. headquarters in the Gaza Strip.

The compound has been serving as a shelter for hundreds of people fleeing Israel's devastating offensive in Gaza. U.N. spokesman Chris Gunness says at least three people were wounded.

The entire area is engulfed in smoke and it's not clear whether anyone is still inside the compound.

The compound includes the headquarters of the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a school and other offices. Gunness says large amounts of aid supplies, as well as fuel trucks, could soon be destroyed.

The attack came as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon was in Israel trying to promote a cease-fire.

NYT caption: A United Nations worker ran out of a warehouse in Gaza City after it was hit by Israeli forces.
(Credit: Photo: Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

(Photo credit, Hatem Moussa/AP).

CQ's Tim Starks:

With one legal step, President Obama could undo the retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications companies allegedly involved in warrantless wiretapping that he opposed as Sen. Obama.

And a hint about what he intends to do could come Thursday at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Eric H. Holder Jr., who would be the man to pull that string as Obama’s attorney general.

A decision to short-circuit retroactive legal immunity for the telecoms would be but the first step in a series of potentially momentous legal, administrative and legislative maneuvers in the aftermath of a 2008 law (PL 110-261) that appeared to set aside troublesome surveillance-related debates, but may not have. ...

FP: Transition Rumint: Names, names, names.

FP: The origins of "smart power": case closed?

Update: More from Shmuel Rosner.

Former Condi Rice speechwriter and advisor Christian Brose evaluates Hillary Clinton's SecState nomination hearing performance, and sees signs of continuity rather than sharp break in US Iran policy: "So the goal, as I understand it, won't change from Bush: an Iranian nuke is unacceptable. And the contours of the strategy she described to pursue it are essentially none too different either. As we read over the weekend, the Bush administration was not hellbent on bombing Iran or having it done for them. Which should only reinforce what the second term policy really was: diplomacy. This is not a synonym for talking. It's a mixture of incentives (economic, technological, engagement, etc.) and disincentives (sanctions, pressure, isolation, etc.) to get Iran to change its behavior. This is essentially what Clinton described the Obama administration's policy will be. ..."

The Connect U.S. Fund, among its 145 signatories former US ambassador Thomas Pickering, prospective State Department policy planning head Anne-Marie Slaughter, and former president Jimmy Carter, calls on new president for responsible U.S. global engagement.

Kevin Drum on Barack Obama 2.0.

Palace Intrigue. Go read Aram Roston's piece on Rakhat Aliyev, and his offer to inform on his former father in law, the president of Kazakhstan, in exchange for immunity from US prosecution and US asylum.

Gaza. A reader writes, "I just heard on Israel Army Radio that according to Palestinian sources Hamas has accepted the Egyptian cease-fire proposal. The reporter said that this hasn't been verified, but it was also reported on the BBC Arabic Service and the Palestinian news service Ramatan."

Bob Woodward:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

Tuesday night. So who did Barack Obama have dinner with? You know: Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, at George Will's place. From tonight's pool report, filed by the NY Daily News' Ken Bazinet: "Pool Report #5, 1-13-09, George Will's House to Hay-Adams. President-elect Obama departed Will's house at 9:10 p.m. (The transition confirmed it is indeed Will's abode) and arrived back at the temporary homestead at 9:3O p.m." The dinner was apparently off the record.

Guess the chardonnay and arugula crowd have to wait their turn as usual for facetime with the prez-elect.

Update: Well, more journos got to meet with him today. Politico: "Today's group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Gerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others."

NYT's Helene Cooper: Bush 'war czar' Ltn. Gen. Douglas Lute to stay in the job: "But Obama transition officials said that General Jones’ decision to keep General Lute — who he has worked with in the past on Iraq-related issues–reflects his belief that there should be some continuity in military policy, even if the new administration is pursuing different Iraq and Afghanistan policies. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that General Jones plans to take an active role in Afghanistan and Iraq issues. General Lute has recently completed a review of Afghanistan policy for President Bush, and one Obama transition official said that there were elements of that policy review which General Jones might seek to keep."

FP: HRC confirmation hearing: smart power, little drama.

JTA's Ron Kampeas on the fraught last days in office of Bush and Olmert.

Tom Ricks: Gen. H.R. McMaster, the brain behind Petraeus, speaks:

In Iraq, as in Vietnam, observes McMaster, "the way the United States went to war influenced everything that followed. A fixation on American technological superiority and an associated neglect of the human, psychological and political dimensions of war doomed one effort and very nearly the other."

The original war plan assumed that the United States could start pulling out shortly after the invasion. "Five years later, it is clear that the initial planning for the war misunderstood the nature of the conflict, underestimated the enemy, and underappreciated the difficulty of the mission."

McMaster hits it out of the park in discussing how inadequate troop levels undercut the war effort. Despite its overly Latinate style, this is one of the most insightful comments I have ever seen on Rumsfeld's botched oversight of the Iraq war from 2003 to the end of 2006 ...

HRC LiveBlog. Jezebel/Glamour's Megan Carpentier is live-blogging Hillary Clinton's nomination hearing at FP's Madam Secretary.

NYT:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday that senior officers must work to prevent the militarization of American foreign policy, and he urged generals and admirals to tell civilian leaders when they believed the armed forces should not take the lead in carrying out policies overseas.

Adm. Mike Mullen, who as chairman is the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, also called for more money and personnel to be devoted to the civilian agencies responsible for diplomacy and overseas economic development.

Reuters: US arms shipment to Israel canceled due to Gaza conflict.

Michael Crowley and Bob Dreyfuss on Jim Jones.

Also from Foreign Policy: The Obama Orphans:

...In conversations over the past couple weeks, sources have told The Cable that something has definitely changed about their relationship to Obamaland since the campaign ended. The transition's inner circle has become excessively secretive, closed, and far from transparent with them about the process for appointing people to jobs.

The irony, these people say, is that those who joined up with the Obama campaign early on -- some at the risk of alienating their old bosses in the Clinton administration -- now find that the Clintonistas have a patron who is taking better care of her people, as they see it, than Obama is of those who worked for him. ...

FP's Shadow Government with 47 questions for Hillary Clinton.

And FP's Madame Secretary/Jezebel/former Glamour magazine writer Megan Carpentier, who will be live-blogging the confirmation hearings tomorrow, with pantsuits protocol.

From Foreign Policy's The Cable: Transition Rumint: More Names.

NYT: In Sunday morning ABC interview, Obama talks of 'new approach' to Iran.

I ran the David Sanger Iran piece by a few people following this issue closely. Their reaction was the same: thought we already knew this. (See this for instance).

My sense is different; we may have seen reports on some of it. But the Sanger piece gives far more credence to and, more importantly, the imprimatur of White House confirmation on, two things: Hersh's report on the existence of a US Iran covert action program (however limited in aims, scope and effectiveness), and how Israel tried to push Bush as recently as this past summer to hit Iran by trying to get permission to make acquisitions and get Iraq overflight permission to do it themselves. (Worth noting: I had reported that Israeli intel chief Meir Dagan was unusually having meetings at the White House one day last July, regarding Iran. But after reading the Sanger piece, it occurs to me that the meeting was likely about the White House briefing Dagan on the alleged covert action program [which seemingly only Bush and his immediate lieutenants would be authorized to do], as much as Dagan reiterating Israeli request for some sort of bunker buster it apparently already had acquired from the US, the GBU-28.) What Sanger says the Bush White House can't answer is how seriously Israel was actually considering doing it itself had it gotten permission from the White House, which it was reportedly denied.

Ha'aretz diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn sees other signs of strain or divergence in the relationship, writing that it is striking too that Bush in the end denied Israel a US veto on the UN Gaza ceasefire resolution, despite a 3am phone call from Olmert asking him to do so. Benn: "At the last minute, at 3:30 A.M., Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also intervened with a desperate phone call to President George W. Bush, requesting that the United States veto the resolution. Bush refused, simply instructing Rice to abstain from the vote. One doesn't need to know all the details to realize that a late-night phone call between national leaders is the result of a major malfunction in the diplomatic handling of state matters, which reveals a problem in the relationship between Israel and the United States."

Tom Segev: a new fatalism. "... For many years, Israel has adhered to a number of basic assumptions that have never proven right. Some of these theories contributed to the operation in Gaza this time. According to one such assumption, inflicting hardship on Palestinian civilians will make the population rise up against its leaders and choose more 'moderate' ones. Hence, when Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, after a short, sharp struggle with its secular rivals in Fatah, Israel imposed a blockade on the strip, pushing 1.5 million Palestinians to the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe. But Hamas has only become stronger. And here's another false Israeli assumption: that Hamas is a terrorist organization. In fact, it's also a genuine national and religious movement supported by most of the people in Gaza. It cannot be simply bombed away. ...

So I find myself among the new majority of Israelis who no longer believe in peace with the Palestinians. The positions are simply too far apart at this time.

I no longer believe in solving the conflict. What I do believe in is better conflict management -- including talks with Hamas, which is a taboo that must be broken. The need for U.S. engagement has led me, along with many other Israelis, to harbor high hopes for the administration of Barack Obama. The Bush administration was mainly concerned with keeping alive a diplomatic fiction called 'The Peace Process.' But there really was no such "process." Instead, the oppression of the Palestinians continued and intensified, even after Israel had evacuated several thousand settlers from Gaza in 2005. More settlements were put up in the West Bank.

The friendliest thing that President Obama can do for Israel in the long run would be to induce her to return to her original purpose: to be a Jewish and democratic country. Rather than design another fictitious 'road map' for peace, the Obama administration may be more useful and successful by trying merely to manage the conflict, aiming at a more limited yet urgently needed goal: to make life more livable for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Newsweek: CIA spooked over the new guy.

"UPDATE: The Weekly Standard claims that Condoleezza Rice strongly advocated that the U.S. vote in favor of the U.N. Resolution which the Security Council approved on Thursday by a 14-0 vote and which urges a cease-fire in Gaza; Dick Cheney argued that the U.S. should veto the Resolution, and Bush ultimately adopted Stephen Hadley's compromise suggestion to abstain, thereby allowing the Resolution to pass. Hamas and Israel competed with one another to see who could refuse most quickly to abide by the Resolution, and now -- as Haaretz reports this morning -- this is Israel's response."

A Washington Israel expert adds:

On the Ha'aretz website there is now a report that the assault will continue for 20 (yes twenty) days. I find that hard to believe, but if it's true then they are hoping with this for the same thing the US hoped for in Iraq, i.e. a transformation. Perhaps instead of avoiding Obama they are trying to force his hand into a more hawkish policy.

Another interpretation, which I have generally subscribed to, is that they have a tiger by the tail; they can't get out without showing results and if they do it now, Hamas will fire rockets tomorrow. Then where will Barak and co. be?

Alternatively, and this is what they now say, they want Mubarak, who is their best Arab ally, to do what he's always refused, i.e., station an int'l force at Rafah to stop the smuggling. That may be too far even for him; it seems to me that would humiliate him more than he will accept.

So far Barak has been very successful at making this the counter-Lebanon. But the endgame is the hardest, and that's where they're approaching.

I really have no idea of what they have in mind; it's not clear at all if they do; more likely there are 3 different strategies.

Update: A US NGO analyst adds, "I think they [the Israelis] are farther than they had originally planned and are surprised how well it has gone. They could have stopped after the air campaign with the tunnels destroyed and Hamas infrastructure gone. Then they realized the civilian casualties were low and no one was saying stop. They are at a crossroads - they can work the diplo angle and pull out with a victory of sorts, but now they are saying they want to stop the rockets. Come on. They will never 100% stop unless Israel really goes in. I think they are figuring out if they have the stomach for that. The casualties, though awful, are still not outrageous, but if they enter the cities and refugee camps..."

Anthony Cordesman on Gaza:

What is the strategic purpose behind the present fighting? After two weeks of combat Olmert, Livni, and Barak have still not said a word that indicates that Israel will gain strategic or grand strategic benefits, or tactical benefits much larger than the gains it made from selectively striking key Hamas facilities early in the war. In fact, their silence raises haunting questions about whether they will repeat the same massive failures made by Israel's top political leadership during the Israeli-Hezbollah War in 2006. Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve? Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel's actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any
hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process?

To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes. To paraphrase a comment about the British government's management of the British Army in World War I, lions seem to be led by donkeys. If Israel has a credible ceasefire plan that could really secure Gaza, it is not apparent. If Israel has a plan that could credibly destroy and replace Hamas, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to help the Gazans and move them back towards peace, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to use US or other friendly influence productively, it not apparent.

As we have seen all too clearly from US mistakes, any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni, and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends. If there is more, it is time to make such goals public and demonstrate how they can be achieved. The question is not whether the IDF learned the tactical lessons of the fighting in 2006. It is whether Israel's top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them.

MJ Rosenberg on Gaza. "That is another reason for a ceasefire now. The first is to stop the killing. The second is to ensure that a year or two from now we are not all wishing that Hamas was still in charge."

Reuters: "The United States is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tons of arms to Israel from Greece later this month, tender documents seen by Reuters show. The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as 'ammunition' on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January." Update: Reuters: Pentagon denies arms are for Gaza. "A Pentagon spokesman said the ammunition was for a U.S. stockpile in Israel. The U.S. military pre-positions stockpiles in some countries in case it needs supplies at short notice." ... "In September, the U.S. Congress approved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world."

BBC: Call for Zeitoun investigation. More. Update: Ha'aretz: IDF investigation calls school killings mistake.

Small Wars Journal notes six new Iraq books.

Jeff Stein: DHS Intel chief and CIA legend Charlie Allen calling it quits.

Foreign Policy: Kremlinology: Obama NSC to downgrade Russia, Ivo Daalder to Nato?

From Foreign Policy: You are cordially uninvited .... the US embassy Hungary edition.

From the legal blog, opiniojuris, Kevin John Heller on meeting his new client Radovan Karadzic.

FP's Carolyn O'Hara on Obama's DoD general counsel pick Jeh Johnson.

Wired. "For the third time in eight months, a social scientist with the Army's Human Terrain cultural research program has died. In early November, while on patrol in an Afghan village, Paula Loyd was doused with a flammable liquid, and set on fire. She suffered second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of her body. Loyd was rushed to a nearby medical center, where she was treated by a burn specialist. Shortly thereafter, Loyd was evacuated to the military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and then to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. But after a two month struggle, she was overcome by her injuries."

WP: Kit Bond to retire.

In FP morning brief, rockets from Lebanon.

NYT: "The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had discovered 'shocking' scenes — including small children next to their mothers’ corpses — when its representatives gained access for the first time to parts of Gaza battered by Israeli shelling. It accused Israel of failing to meet obligations to care for the wounded in areas of combat. In response, the Israeli military did not comment directly on the allegation."

NYT: "President-elect Barack Obama is preparing to scrap the way President Bush oversaw domestic security in the White House and name a former Central Intelligence Agency official to coordinate counterterrorism, people close to the transition said Wednesday. The plan would eliminate the independent homeland security adviser’s office and assign those duties to the National Security Council to streamline sometimes overlapping functions. A deputy national security adviser would be charged with overseeing the effort to guard against terrorism and to respond to natural disasters. Democrats close to the transition said Mr. Obama’s choice for that job was John O. Brennan, a longtime C.I.A. veteran who was the front-runner to head the spy agency until withdrawing in November amid criticism of his views on interrogation and detention policies. His nomination would not require Senate confirmation."

MJ: The hawks in winter.

A Hill friend writes, "The Speaker's Office, which sends out all sorts of stuff of course, has started a new daily item - the Blog Report, which is a daily email from that office surveying the Democratic blogosphere on issues of the day. Pretty interesting, no? The power of blogs in the Pelosi Century."

FP: Dennis Ross for uber-envoy?

Update: Asked what he thought of the reported appointment, one Washington Mideast hand who asked to speak on background comments, "Maybe it means that they are serious about Iran and know Israel is key and thar Ross can deliver them. (Baker says he does what he's told). Or it means that Obama intends to hand over Iran policy to AIPAC. Either is possible. I lean to the first."

Abu M gets award for best Ross title.

JTA's Ron Kampeas writes about his friend AP Gaza reporter Ibrahim Barzak, whose hometown has been destroyed in the fighting.

Tom Ricks on getting blackballed for a time by the Army war college for reporting critically about the Iraq war.

But more important is what Metz's note may say about the state of academic freedom at the Army War College. When I asked him why he would urge his colleagues to shun me, he quickly apologized via e-mail and explained that it had to do with the political climate at the college back then. In fact, he explicitly blamed the strained relationship between the Army and its civilian overseers under then-Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "[A]t the time -- with growing sensitivity to criticism by Rumsfeld and the Army's attempt to make peace with Rumsfeld after Shinseki left -- several members of SSI had been verbally flogged after interviews with you when the stories portrayed [sic] as more critical of the administration than we intended. We were worried about what might happen to SSI, even frightened for the organization. Many of us, including me, simply stopped doing interviews. Luckily, the climate eventually changed."

AP/TPM/WashIndy: Joe the Plumber to Israel as Pajamas' Media war correspondent.

News: Dems are going to seat Burris? Up to 58 Dems in the Senate, 41 Republicans, with Franken/Coleman race being litigated.

Update: Sounds like not quite yet. Latest from Senate Majority Leader Reid:

“We just had a very positive meeting with Roland Burris. I know that Mr. Burris wants to honorably serve the people of Illinois. Unfortunately, he has been appointed by a man who has been tainted by a serious scandal – one that involves the very seat in question.

“In the coming days, several things must happen before this is resolved. Mr. Burris understands the first step is that he must have a valid certification signed by both the governor and the secretary of state, as Senate rules have dictated for more than a hundred years. Second, he will testify tomorrow before the Illinois General Assembly impeachment panel. And finally, if there is a solution, it must be reached by the entire Senate – and I have encouraged Mr. Burris to reach out to Leader McConnell and the Republicans.

“But as we have said all along, the easiest way forward is still for Gov. Blagojevich to resign his post or be impeached, and to let the lieutenant governor make a selection to fill the vacancy. If he selects Roland Burris, we would have no objection.”

WP: Who kicked Obama out of Blair House? Australia's John Howard. "The veil is lifted. We now know who is booked at Blair House, kicking President-elect Barack Obama and his family to the waiting list and across Lafayette Park to the Hay-Adams Hotel. The only overnight visitor at the presidential guest manse is none other than John Howard, a former Australian prime minister and leading member of President Bush's coalition of the willing in Iraq. Howard and his entourage will be bunking at Blair House on Jan. 12, the night before he, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe are to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Bush. ... Blair and Uribe also were invited to stay at Blair House, but declined Bush's invitation, a second White House official said today. Blair, who traditionally stays at the British Embassy, and Uribe apparently found other accommodations, said the second White House official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity." More.

FP: Transition Rumint, Part IV: The Pentagon:

Former Clinton-era Navy Secretary Richard Danzig has long been considered a likely successor to Gates, and conventional wisdom had it that he was a likely deputy defense secretary. But two Democratic sources familiar with the current thinking on the Obama team say the No. 2 person's role will primarily be to manage the department, rather than preparing to take the helm. Sources in Washington defense circles and media reports now say that former Clinton-era Under Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn is likely to be get the deputy slot. My sources tell me that Lynn, a former Pentagon comptroller and more recently a senior vice president at Raytheon, is considered a "money" guy who can help get a handle on budget, system and personnel matters at the gargantuan bureaucracy during a war-time, recession-era administration.

Also said to be in line for top DoD jobs:

Michele Flournoy, a former Clinton-era principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction who is now president of the Center for a New American Security. Sources say she is likely to be named the undersecretary of defense for policy (Eric Edelman's current and Doug Feith's old job)

Two former senior Pentagon officials now affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School: Ashton Carter, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, and Sarah Sewall, who was the first deputy assistant secretary of defense for peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance during the Clinton administration and is with Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Sewall wrote the introduction to the recent U.S. Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Manual. Neither could be reached for comment...

Update: Writing at Shadow Government, former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim says former Pentagon comptroller William Lynn would make an excellent deputy defense secretary: "The 'DepSecDef' is now also formally designated as the Department's Chief Management Officer. His job is not to make policy; it is to make the trains run on time. And in DOD the trains have often run late, if they run at all."

Good Post piece on Hill annoyance at Obama over how Panetta choice handled. And their demands: "Several committee Democrats made clear that they expect CIA Deputy Director Stephen R. Kappes and Intelligence Director Michael Morell, the agency's No. 3 official, to be retained for continuity and experience. An Obama transition official confirmed that both will be invited to stay."

Amusing FP art for transition purgatory series.

Also on the site today:

Marc Lynch: "I spent the morning at a lecture organized by GWU's outstanding Homeland Security Policy Institute's Ambassador's Roundtable Series featuring Israel's Ambassador to the United States Sallai Meridor. It was a profoundly dismaying experience. Because if Ambassador Meridor is taken at his word, then Israel has no strategy in Gaza. Asked three times by audience members, Meridor simply could not offer any plausible explanation as to how its military campaign in Gaza would achieve its stated goals. ..."

Carolyn O'Hara: Four questions Senator Clinton would ask nominee Clinton.

Nick Gvosdev argues that Gazprom's threats to cut off Ukraine more a sign of desperation than hard ball.

Dan Drezner argues against shrinking the NSC: "In the end, the NSC has no resources except access to the president and staff. To actually coordinate or implement foreign policy, the NSC needs to be on top of what other agencies are doing. A smaller staff makes that task much more difficult. Indeed, after policy coordination miscues in the early years of their administrations, both Clinton and Bush wound up reversing course on the NSC."

David Kenner: Why hasn't Hezbollah joined the fight?

Obama on Panetta. From the pool report:

Obama: I have the utmost respect for Leon Panetta. I think that he is one of the finest public servants that we have. He brings extraordinary management skills, great political savvy, an impeccable record of integrity.

As chief of staff, he is somebody who - to the president - he's somebody who obviously was fully versed in international affairs, crisis management, and had to evaluate intelligence consistently on a day-to-day basis.

Having said all that, I have not made an announcement. When we make the announcement, I think what people will see is, is that we are putting together a top-notch intelligence team that is not only going to assure that I get the best possible intelligence unvarnished, that the intelligence community is no longer geared towards telling the president what they think the president wants to hear, but instead are going to be delivering the information that the president needs to make critical decisions to keep the American people safe.

I think what you're also going to see is a team that is committed to breaking with some of the past practices and concerns that have, I think, tarnished the image of the agencies, the intelligence agencies, as well as U.S. foreign policy.

Last point I will make, though, on this is that there are outstanding intelligence professionals in the CIA, in DNI, and others, and I have the utmost regard for the work that they've done, and we are committed to making sure that this is a team effort that's not looking backwards, but is looking forward to figure out how we're going to serve the American people best, OK?

Over at Foreign Policy: Rumint on key State Department posts:

... Clinton has chosen to appoint two deputies: James Steinberg, who previous to serving as deputy national security advisor in the Clinton administration was director of policy planning at State and provided advice to both Democratic candidates during the campaign; and Jacob "Jack" Lew, who directed the Office of Management and Budget in the (Bill) Clinton White House. Lew will focus on budget issues, namely trying to increase the department's budget and personnel. (Ironically in traditionally turf-conscious Washington, one of the biggest advocates for a bigger State Department has been none other than Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has warned against the dangers of military mission creep.)

Democratic foreign-policy watchers say Hillary selected her under secretaries and ran them by the Obama transition officials last week (some of them, including William J. Burns, the current under secretary of state for political affairs and recent U.S. point man on Iran, who is very well regarded inside the department, and Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management, are expected to hold over in the next term). Nonproliferation community experts say that retired Foreign Service officer Robert Einhorn, who was a top nonproliferation advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign (and later for Obama) and is currently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is expected to be named undersecretary of state for arms control and international cooperation. (He did not immediately respond to a query).

At the next level, former Clinton-era deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and NSC official Kurt Campbell, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, who advised the Hillary Clinton campaign, is expected to be named assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. His wife Lael Brainard, a former White House economics hand now with the Brookings Institution, is expected to get a top economics post, possibly assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs. Former Clinton-era State Department counselor and North Korea expert Wendy Sherman, a close Hillary Clinton associate and advisor, is said to be being considered for several possible top State jobs as well, including that of North Korea envoy plus counselor, or under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs, sources said. (Sherman co-led the State Department agency review team for the Obama transition, along with Thomas Donilon, who has since been named deputy national security advisor.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, is likely to be named director of policy planning, sources said. She'd be the first woman to run the State Department's in-house think tank.

Sources said former NSC Africa hand Gayle Smith, of the Center for American Progress, is being considered to head USAID.

Two names have emerged as leading contenders to be assistant secretary of Near Eastern Affairs: Daniel Kurtzer, an Obama campaign Middle East advisor and former Clinton-era U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel, and Beth Jones, a former State Department official who is currently with APCO, the communications firm. (Former A/S NEA David Welch retired last month and joined Bechtel). [...]

Another key but low-profile figure who has emerged as influential on national security personnel decisions in the Obama transition is Christopher Kojm, former deputy director of the 9/11 commission, former deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence policy, and member of the Iraq Study Group (of which Obama's reported choice to run the CIA Leon Panetta was also a member). Kojm has been on the Obama transition national security policy review team, and has spoken with a number of former national security officials in vetting possible appointments, both at State and on other national security matters, although it's not clear what position, if any, he might take.

Guardian: "The civilian death toll in Gaza increased dramatically today, with reports of more than 40 Palestinians killed after missiles exploded outside a UN school where hundreds of people were sheltering from the continuing Israeli offensive."

Update: More from MSNBC:

An Israeli bombardment hit outside a U.N. school where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge on Tuesday, killing at least 30 people — many of them children — as international outrage grew over civilian deaths.

President-elect Barack Obama, breaking his silence about the Gaza conflict, said the loss of life in Gaza and Israel "is a source of deep concern for me." But Obama otherwise said he would adhere to his principle that only President George W. Bush would speak for American foreign policy at this time. ...

A U.N. official in Gaza said a school where dozens of Palestinians were killed by tank shells on Tuesday was clearly marked with a U.N. flag and its location had been reported to Israeli authorities.

John Ging, director of operations in Gaza for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said the death toll in the Israeli artillery strike near the school in Jabalya refugee camp was 30 dead with another 55 people injured.

NYT: An ex-detainee of the U.S. describes six-year denial.

At Foreign Policy: Transition purgatory, NSC edition.

The Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer on the top ten risks of 2009.

David Rothkopf on the Panetta pick.

NYT: Leon Panetta to be named CIA director.

Update: Former intelligence officials react to Panetta pick:

...Former intelligence analyst Greg Treverton, now with the Rand Corporation, said Panetta's experience as a former White House chief of staff might give him a unique understanding of the presidency and its needs for intelligence. "One of my experiences with people like Panetta who have been chief of staff is that they have a clear sense of what is helpful to the president that most senior officials don't," Treverton told me. "They get it. What he could do and couldn't do. And that's an interesting advantage Panetta brings. Knowledge of what the presidential stakes are like, how issues arise, and what they need to be protected from, for better or worse."

Retired CIA deputy director for the East Europe division Milt Bearden said Panetta is a "brilliant" choice. "It is not problematic that Panetta lacks experience in intelligence," Bearden e-mailed. "Intel experience is overrated. Good judgement, common sense, and an understanding of Washington is a far better mix to take to Langley than the presumption of experience in intelligence matters. Having a civilian in the intelligence community mix is, likewise, a useful balance. Why not DNI?"

The Panetta choice also makes sense to him, said Philip Zelikow, a former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and Foreign Policy writer). "The issues of presidential trust and clean hands are, at this moment in history, most important," Zelikow said by e-mail. "And even an 'intelligence professional' would have to rely on others in many ways. ... So Obama and his team have made a certain kind of tradeoff." ...

Update II: Sounds like Obama plans to officially roll out the Panetta and Blair nominations together sometime this week. And that the NYT/NBC leak preceded team Obama's plans to consult with Hill intel folks. More from Elana Schor on Feinstein's preference for DO veteran Steve Kappes to stay on in a top CIA job.

New Foreign Policy. As I mentioned Friday, definitely check out the new Foreign Policy site, which relaunched today.

You can find (and bookmark) my reported daily, online column on foreign policy, The Cable. Today, I report on "transition purgatory," for those still in limbo about whether they will get a job in the new administration. "... But now, amid the information vacuum, conspiracy theories abound: 'It's Hillary's fault,' ... has been succeeded by 'It's Biden's fault,' referring to fears that prized White House slots will go to Biden loyalists and others from their network of Senate staffers rather than early members of Obama's foreign advisory teams. ..." My new colleague Stephen Walt argues that the names don't tell us as much as one might think.

On the site today: Former US Mideast envoy Aaron David Miller, author of one of the best recent books on US policy to the Mideast, The Too Much Promised Land, is blogging Gaza at one of the site's regular features, the Argument.

Veteran Washington Post Pentagon correspondent and "Fiasco" author Tom Ricks is blogging "the Best Defense" here.

Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark fame today blogs Maliki in Tehran.

At Shadow Government, Philip Zelikow is blogging what Bush got wrong (and three things he got right.) ("Failure #2: Having developed a powerful diagnosis of global conditions and opportunities, the administration failed to develop a meaningful conception for global cooperation. ...") Other contributors, many out of the recent ranks of the Bush administration, to Shadow Government: Kori Schake, Steve Biegun, Peter Feaver, Vance Serchuk, etc., moderated by the "whip-smart" former Rice speechwriter and new Foreign Policy editor Christian Brose.

Counterinsurgency gurus ret. Ltn. Col. John Nagl and Nate Fick of the Center for a New American Security apply counterinsurgency lessons to Afghanistan.

NSC auteur David Rothkopf introduces his eponymous blog here, as do Dan Drezner and Stephen Walt.

Carolyn O'Hara rounds up Hillary news you might have missed at her blog, Madam Secretary. Joshua Keating is writing a daily morning brief news round up of international developments at FP's Passport.

Go check it out! Let me know what you think.

NYT: Many Middle East experts believe that Israel timed its move against Hamas with the expectation of receiving backing in Washington.

Obama arrives in Washington. From the latest pool report, filed by Politico's Nia-Malika Henderson:

President-elect Barack Obama arrived in DC at AFB at 7pm EST after leaving Midway airport at 4:45 pm CST.

He left his Hyde Park house at about 4pm and arrived at Midway about 30 minutes later.

As he boarded plane, he waved to press and said he would see us in DC. He came to back of plane and said the following:

"Well guys, I am looking forward to seeing you guys in Washington.....I gotta say I choked up a little bit leaving my house today." ... "Malia's friend had dropped off an album of the two of them together. They had been friends since pre-school and I just looked through the pages and the house was empty and it was a little tough, it got me."

He ordered a cheeseburger on the plane, which is a Boeing 757 with big leather seats. He met Col. Scott Turner, who will be his Air Force One pilot.

Obama said he had taken a government plane before. Said Michelle and the girls were "having fun" and that he was looking forward to going to Washington.

"Although living in a hotel for two weeks, we kind of did that for two years."

NYT: "Taken together, it suggests that even if Israel intends to hold back from completely overthrowing Hamas, its choice of assault tactics could head that way anyway. And the Israelis may already be facing a kind of mission creep: after all, if enough of Hamas’s infrastructure is destroyed, the prospect of governing Gaza, a densely populated, refugee-filled area whose weak economy has been devastated by the Israeli-led boycott, will be exceedingly difficult. ... At what human cost? And who will be in charge when it is all over?"

Foreign Policy. I'm very happy to announce that I am joining Foreign Policy magazine, which is launching an exciting new daily, online site starting Monday featuring a bunch of high-powered foreign policy and national security thinkers, writers, reporters and practitioners. Among them, long time Washington Post defense correspondent Tom Ricks, author of "Fiasco," who will be writing a daily blog, "The Best Defense," on all aspects of hard power; Arab world expert Marc Lynch of the excellent Abu Aardvark blog and George Washington University, and Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School, are both moving their blogs to the site. Foreign Policy editor Carolyn O'Hara will closely observe all things Hillary (including the array of pants suits) in a new blog, Madam Secretary. Former Bush I NSC official, Rice counselor and 9/11 commission executive director Philip Zelikow, former Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim, former NSC official (and Palin foreign policy advisor) Steve Biegun, Bush-era NSC advisor Peter Feaver, and former Condi Rice speechwriter and current Foreign Policy editor Christian Brose will be blogging "the Shadow Government," unclassified for all of us civilians. Former Clinton administration official and NSC chronicler David Rothkopf will interpret the mysteries of Washington powerbrokers; and Harvard's Stephen Walt, author of "The Israel Lobby," will offer his Realist take on global affairs. Veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent and national editor Susan Glasser is executive-editing the whole thing, with help from Foreign Policy online editor Blake Hounshell, and deputy online editor Rebecca Frankel.

As for me, I will be reporting and writing a reported, scoopy online daily column, The Cable, on all things foreign policy.

It's a site we foreign policy junkies, and War and Piece readers, will want to check (at least) daily, and I will rely on your continued tips, insights, hallway gossip, draft memos, after-action reports, after-hours debriefs, and readership. I'm really thrilled to build on the work I've done, including with readers' considerable guidance here at War and Piece, and with the camaraderie and support of lots of great reporter, editor, and blogger colleagues, and insights from many foreign policy and security hands and interested onlookers, and look forward to information-sharing with you all at the new site. (War and Piece will go on, if at reduced capacity). I'll put up all the relevant links so you can easily navigate over when they go live, inshallah, on Monday.