The Washington Post's Walter Pincus has an analysis of Robert Gates recent articles and media appearances. He writes:

A longtime Russia analyst during his years with the CIA, Gates today sees Moscow as less of a threat than do many inside and outside the U.S. military establishment.

Pincus is referring to statements like this one, from Gates' piece in the new Foreign Affairs:

Russian tanks and artillery may have crushed Georgia's tiny military. But before the United States begins rearming for another Cold War, it must remember that what is driving Russia is a desire to exorcise past humiliation and dominate its "near abroad" -- not an ideologically driven campaign to dominate the globe. As someone who used to prepare estimates of Soviet military strength for several presidents, I can say that Russia's conventional military, although vastly improved since its nadir in the late 1990s, remains a shadow of its Soviet predecessor. And adverse demographic trends in Russia will likely keep those conventional forces in check.

Good point, but do "many inside and outside the U.S. military establishment" really disagree with it? I find it hard to believe that even those who think the military is neglecting conventional threats by focusing on counterinsurgency would argue that Russia today is a comparable threat to the Soviet Union.

If there actually is a real debate about this, I'm glad Gates is the one in charge. Here's hoping he and his colleagues continue the recent strategy of basically ignoring Russia's pointless military posturing and focusing their attention where real damage can be done.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Richard Perle and Doug Feith think Leon Panetta, a Democratic insider if there ever was one, is just the man to clean up the CIA:

Panetta is "a very smart, very capable guy with a lot of experience - I think he's the right sort of person to take a shot at improving the place," said Perle, an agency critic who, as chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, was an architect of the Iraq war, and called the quality of the CIA's analysis "appalling."

"It's going to take somebody from outside to right that ship, if it can be done," Perle said. [...]

"One possible implication of appointing somebody from the outside is that the president recognizes that there are serious problems at the CIA and he wants somebody who is not a part of those problems," said Feith, who was Bush's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Senate Democrats aren't so thrilled, particularly Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein, who will oversee Panetta's confirmation process and believes that "the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge."

Panetta may have been an "any port in a storm" pick as time ran out for the transition, but may in the end turn out to be a great one for an agency in dire need of a fresh set of eyes. That said, this clumsy leak is certainly not the way Obama wanted his outside-the-box pick rolled out. As Ezra Klein notes:

It doesn't look good that the worst leak of the Obama administration came in its spymaster.

Interesting choice. The New York Times' caucus blog reports:

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman and White House chief of staff, to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that Mr. Obama criticized during the campaign for using interrogation methods he decried as torture, Democratic officials said Monday.

Panetta has managerial chops and a close relationship with Obama but virtually no hands-on intelligence experience. Perhaps more importantly, he's not tainted by associations with Bush-era detention, interrogation of surveillance policies like some of the other candidates who were considered. He's also a much bigger name.

Langley may be in for a shakeup.

Update: Our new colleague David Rothkopf calls the pick a reminder to the "knowledgeable intel community (IC) insiders just how wrong they can be about key issues."

Update 2: Another of our new colleagues, Laura Rozen, has reactions from former intelligence officials over at The Cable. RAND's Greg Treverton tells her that Panetta's White House experience might actually be more valuable than time spent in the intel trenches:

"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."

This makes sense. In his CIA history "Legacy of Ashes," Tim Weiner writes that Harry Truman originally envisioned the agency's mission as producing a "secret newspaper" for the president's eyes only. As the CIA's secretive culture developed during the Cold War and emphasis shifted away from simple intelligence gathering toward special operations, the mission got a lot more complicated.

Picking an executive branch guy like Panetta may signal that Obama wants to push the CIA back toward something closer to Truman's original vision of an agency who's primary mission is to keep the president better informed than his international rivals.

If so, it won't be easy. The diverging views in Rozen's post gives a good preview of how this fight may play out.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The classic kung fu movie "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin" (popularized in the U.S. by the Wu Tang Clan) consists almost entirely of an extended training sequence in which the hero must test himself in increasingly difficult "chambers" created by the Shaolin temple monks before achieving the martial arts mastery needed to vanquish his enemies.

Ever since Joe Biden's infamous warning that Barack Obama would face "an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy," observers seem to be treating international events as a series of Shaolin-like "tests" for the president-elect to pass before achieving bona-fide statesman status. The big question is which test Obama will have to face first.

Would Russia putting missiles on the EU's doorstep be Obama's first test? Or would it be Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Or Pakistan? The Mumbai attacks were a popular choice for a while. Dark horse contenders include instability in Somalia and cranky European allies. Lately, the violence in Gaza has seemed an increasingly likely candidate.

Or perhaps... all of the above?

Looking at international affairs this way is both misleading and unfortunately, overly optimistic. Unlike the Shaolin trainee, Obama doesn't have the luxury of facing these tests one at a time, picking up valuable skills along the way. He's going to have to face all of them at once, along with urgent domestic issues and an economy in shambles.

Contrary to what Obama's secretary of state once said, there's no such thing as a "commander-in-chief threshold." Obama will not face down some international crisis and prove himself as a qualified world leader. He's going to have to learn on the job and he will make rookie mistakes as well as (let's hope) major breakthroughs.

It's doubtful that any of the above situations are going to be "solved" no matter how brilliant Obama proves to be, and there's a better-than-even chance that his biggest foreign policy test will be something that isn't even on anyone's radar right now. Americans will have a chance to judge whether he's at least handled himself competently when he faces the presidency's 36th chamber: re-election.

Photo by Jeff Haynes-Pool/Getty Images

If there were any lingering doubt that peace between Israelis and the Palestinians is not in the offing in 2009, the recent eruption of war in Gaza has finally erased it.

A lot has already been said about the fighting, and it's all very predictable. Israel's usual critics are critical of the operation; Israel's usual defenders in favor. Dust off the commentary from any number of depressingly similar situations over the past few decades, change the date and the particulars of today's situation, cut, paste and you have yourself yet another debate over who the real terrorists are, who started the fighting, and what constitutes a "proportionate" response to assymetrical warfare.

Frankly, I'm not interested in all that.

One thing I'm struck by is just how little the Israeli government seems to have thought things through. Yes, we know that plans were in the works for something like six months. Yes, Hamas was clearly surprised on a tactical level, but the group must have been expecting to be hit sooner or later.

But what is the exit plan here? Pound Hamas until they cry uncle? And why would Israel be willing to trade some temporary advantages in Gaza for a number of strategic setbacks: the effective end of the Annapolis process, a possible collapse of the peace track with Syria, worldwide opprobrium, a reinvigorated radical camp in Iran, the further undermining of pro-Western regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and a Hamas that may in fact emerge stronger vis-à-vis the ever-shrinking Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction?

Yes, as U.S. President-elect Barack Obama put it last summer during a visit to rocket-plagued Sderot, "If someone was sending rockets on my house where my daughters were sleeping at night, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." But how you choose to stop the rockets matters a great deal. Revenge is not a strategy for national success.

I watched Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, explain to David Gregory on Meet the Press right after the operation began that its goal was not to achieve some kind of objective for Israel, but simply to send a message that Hamas's rocket attacks won't go unanswered.

Here's the exchange:

MR. GREGORY: What is Israel's goal right now? Is it to re-establish the cease-fire, or is it to invade Gaza and remove Hamas from power?

MS. LIVNI: Our goal is not to reoccupy Gaza Strip. We left Gaza Strip. We took off for the south. We dismantled all the settlements. But since Gaza Strip has been controlled by the extremists and since Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas and since Hamas is using Gaza Strip in order to target us, we need to give an answer to this.

MR. GREGORY: Foreign Minister, aren't you making the case for pushing Hamas from power? The cease-fire, according to Israel, simply hasn't worked. It hasn't stopped the bombing of Sderot and Israel in the southern areas. So only the replacement of Hamas by Fatah, by more moderate leaders, appears to be the only answer.

MS. LIVNI: The goal is to give an answer to our citizens, to give them the possibility to live in peace like any other citizen in the world, and Hamas needs to understand it.

Or, as TNR's Marty Peretz put it, the message was nothing more sophisticated than, "Do not fuck with the Jews."

Watch Livni here:

The announcement that Reverend Rick Warren will be delivering the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration has already drawn some harsh criticism.

High on the list of complaints is that Warren, pastor of the Saddleback mega-church in Orange County, California, is anti-gay-marriage and recently threw his support behind California's much-debated Proposition 8. The Human Rights Campaign has sent Obama a letter asking him to "reconsider."

Liberal bloggers also denounced Obama's selection. Ezra Klein at The American Prospect said:

There's a difference between reaching out to the evangelical community with respect and surrendering to it. Obama could have called on an Episcopalian or a Methodist or any number of more complicated and nuanced religious figures. Giving Warren this sort of political-religious opportunity effectively codifies his position as America's most politically important, and accepted, religious leader. That seems unwise, and unnecessary."

As Klein himself points out, Warren "is the author of the best-selling book of all time" and concedes an argument (albeit an unlikely one in his opinion), can be made that "Obama's demonstrated respect for the preacher might build some level of rapport, or at least openness, with that community."

But how surprised are we really by this invitation? Obama has reached out to America's most powerful evangelical before, sharing the stage with him for an event on AIDS prevention, (that time it was Warren who drew criticism from his followers) and participating in a campaign forum at Saddleback.

We've had our eye on Warren's rise in U.S. politics. In our World's Top Religious Power Brokers List from October, I wrote, "Whichever candidate wins in November, he’ll likely be making a regular pilgrimage to Orange County for counsel and support." It appears the back-scratching has begun.

Photo: David McNew/Getty Images

The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation released its donors list today. Peter Baker of the New York Times reports some of the highlights:

The two largest contributors, listed as giving more than $25 million apiece, were the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, a grant-making charity that focuses on sub-Saharan Africa and India, and UNITAID, an international alliance formed two years ago to fight H.I.V./AIDS. Another 11 donors gave between $10 million and $25 million, including Mr. Bing, Mr. Gates’s foundation and the Saudi government.

Also in this category is Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining financier whose dealings with Mr. Clinton have drawn questions in the past. Mr. Clinton traveled with Mr. Giustra in 2005 to Kazakhstan, where Mr. Giustra was seeking uranium contracts. Mr. Clinton lavished praise on Kazakhstan’s authoritarian leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and Mr. Giustra’s company soon afterward signed preliminary agreements to buy into state-controlled uranium projects. [...]

Another donor listed as giving between $1 million and $5 million is Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian tycoon who is the son-in-law of that nation’s former authoritarian president, Leonid Kuchma, whose handpicked successor was prevented from taking power during the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004.

Among governments — or entities funded by them — that contributed, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was the largest donor, giving between $10 million and $25 million. Norway gave between $5 million and $10 million. Kuwait, Qatar, the Dubai Foundation, Brunei Darussalam, and Oman donated between $1 million and $5 million each.

The full list is on the foundation's website, which seems to be down from all the traffic. Stay tuned for more.

What does Barack Obama's just-named Education Secretary Arne Duncan have in common with National Security Advisor Jim Jones, Attorney General Eric Holder, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner?

Professional accomplishment? Certainly.

Sound judgement? Possibly.

Most importantly, they're all great basketball players. Even 81-year-old economic advisor Paul Volcker used to play at Princeton.

Duncan has a good shot at being the team's MVP. He was co-captain of the Harvard basketball team and played professionally in Australia:

“I did not select Arne because he’s one of the best basketball players I know,” Mr Obama said yesterday. “Although I will say that I think we are putting together the best basketball-playing cabinet in American history.”

Forget engagement. Obama should just bet Iran's right to a nuclear program on a game of half-court with Ahmadinejad's cabinet.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

NBC News reports on the status of Christopher Hill, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and the point man on U.S. negotiations with North Korea:

Hill said today that he has NOT been asked to stay on in an Obama administration. "I haven't talked to anybody about my future," he said in response to a reporter's question about a possible role in the diplomatic corps of the next president, adding wryly, "I do need to figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up." [...]

[Hill] spoke to reporters today in the wake of bad news for the U.S. in six-party talks, which suffered a major setback last week when North Korean negotiators refused to sign on to guidelines for a "verification protocol" that would open up north Korean nuclear facilities to intrusive inspections, including collecting and removing nuclear samples from the country.

Photo: FILE; FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Ben Smith:

Rep. Xavier Becerra tells the editorial board of La Opinion that he has turned down the job of U.S. trade representative, having concluded -- trade watchers take note -- that trade won't be the first, second, or third priority of the Obama administration.

With many of the Cabinet-level posts in the new Obama administration already filled, the identity of one big position -- the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq -- remains up in the air. Obama's national security team is convening today and the question of who will act as America's day-to-day emissary to the Iraqi government will likely be on the docket. So, who is in line to be our next man in Baghdad? Here are four possibilities:

Ryan Crocker

Former Ambassador to Syria and Israel Edward Djerejian pushed the possibility of keeping on a former member of his staff, current U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. "He has a record of seeking out difficult assignments," Djerejian told me. "He knows the region like the back of his hand, [and] he works well with the military." Among other impressive assignments, Crocker served in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and became ambassador at the conclusion of the war in 1990. He also was sent to Kabul to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan in January 2002, and served as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007.

David Satterfield

One person who may be able to duplicate Crocker's knowledge of the Middle East, while still allowing Obama to claim the mantle of "change," is another career diplomat, David Satterfield. He currently serves as senior advisor to Secretary Rice on Iraq, and had previously been the deputy chief of mission in Baghdad. He has also served abroad in Tunis, Jeddah, Beirut, and Damascus, as well as a stint in Washington as director of the State Department's Office of Israel and Arab-Israeli Affairs.

Frank Ricciardone

Ricciardone served as the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt from 2005 until earlier this year. Ricciardone has long experience working with Kurdish groups in the north of Iraq. He served as U.S. political advisor for Operation Provide Comfort, an effort by the US and Turkish military to protect Kurds persecuted by Saddam Hussein following the first Gulf War. In 1999, he was selected as the State Department's special coordinator for the transition of Iraq, tasked with coordinating the overthrow of Hussein's regime with Iraq opposition groups.

Richard Holbrooke

Journalist and blogger Spencer Ackerman endorsed the former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke for the position. Ackerman speculates that Holbrooke could use his experience mediating in the Balkans to help Iraq overcome its sectarian obstacles. Having evidently missed out on a place in the cabinet, serving as U.S. ambassador to Iraq is one of the few remaining positions appropriate to Holbrooke's stature. However, he lacks the Middle East experience of the other candidates, as well as fluency in Arabic, which is crucial for public diplomacy.

These are some names currently grinding through the D.C. rumor mill. Who do you think would be right for the job?

Photos: CEERWAN AZIZ/AFP/Getty Images, Mohammed Jalil-Pool/Getty Images, cairo.usembassy.gov, Alex Wong/Getty Images

Overall, Bush administration officials deserve credit for making this transition as painless and drama-free as possible. One notable exception is NASA Administrator Mike Griffin:

Tensions were on public display last week at the NASA library, as overheard by guests at a book party. According to people who were present, Logsdon, a space historian, told a group of about 50 people he had just learned that President John F. Kennedy’s transition team had completely ignored NASA.

Griffin responded, in a loud voice, “I wish the Obama team would come and talk to me.”

Alan Ladwig, a transition team member who was at the party with Garver, shouted out: “Well, we’re here now, Mike.”

Soon after, Garver and Griffin engaged in what witnesses said was an animated conversation. Some overheard parts of it.

“Mike, I don’t understand what the problem is. We are just trying to look under the hood,” Garver said.

“If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar,” Griffin replied. “Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.

He reportedly also told the head of Obama's space transition team, a former senior NASA official, that she was "not qualified" and demanded to speak to the president-elect personally.

Obama expressed skepticism about the utility of manned space flight during the campaign and has proposed partially funding his education plan by delaying NASA's manned Constellation program. In light of this, it makes sense that Griffin is suspicious, but something tells me Richard Muller's going to be very happy.

(Hat tip: Matt Yglesias)

Photo: Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

D.C.-based research analyst, blogger, and former McCain campaign advisor David Adesnik writes:

Thank you for bringing accountability to the predictions game. May I suggest, however, that you passed over one of the most strategically significant predictions falsified in 2008? In early 2007, Barack Obama stated clearly, "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there; in fact, I think it'll do the reverse." This September, Sen. Obama acknowledged that the surge "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." Thankfully, the president-elect's decision to keep Robert Gates as his Secretary of Defense suggests that he has learned from his mistake.

Marc Ambinder reports:

Mark Lippert, a senior national security adviser to Obama during the campaign, will be chief-of-staff at the National Security Council. In that role, he's likely to be a constant presence by Obama's side. Lippert, an intelligence officer who served in the Iraq war, was the first foreign policy adviser that Sen. Obama hired.

Sesame Street, the U.S. television show, used to have a segment called "one of these things is not like the others."

Can you spot the anomoly in this list?

• James Schlesinger
• Charles Duncan
• James Edwards
• Donald Hodel
• John Herringon
• James Watkins
• Hazel O'Leary
• Federico Pena
• Bill Richardson
• Spencer Abraham
• Samuel Bodman
• Steven Chu

You guessed it: Steven Chu is the only name on this list that is followed by the letters P, h, and D. He's also the only one with a Nobel Prize, and the only one who has run a major laboratory. Frankly, he is a badass -- and he will be looking to get things done on climate change.

The current U.S. energy secretary, Samuel Bodman, is the only other scientist on the list, but he has an Sc.D degree in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Basically, it's the same thing as a Ph.D, but Bodman has long since stopped practicing chemical engineering.

Photo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Michael Crowley's new piece on Afghanistan should be a sobering read for liberal hawks:

For the left in the Bush era, America's two wars have long been divided into the good and the bad. Iraq was the moral and strategic catastrophe, while Afghanistan--home base for the September 11 attacks--was a righteous fight. This dichotomy was especially appealing to liberals because it allowed them to pair their call for withdrawal from Iraq with a call for escalation in Afghanistan. Leaving Iraq wasn't about retreating; it was about bolstering another front, one where our true strategic interests lie. The left could meet conservative charges of defeatism with the rhetoric of victory. Barack Obama is now getting ready to turn this idea into policy. He has already called for sending an additional two U.S. brigades, or roughly 10,000 troops, to the country and may wind up proposing a much larger escalation in what candidate Obama has called "the war we need to win."

But, as Nagl understands at the ground level, winning in Afghanistan will take more than just shifting a couple of brigades from the bad war to the good one. Securing Afghanistan--and preserving a government and society we can be proud of--is vastly more challenging than the rhetoric of the campaign has suggested [...] The challenge of exiting Iraq was supposed to be the first great foreign policy test of Obama's presidency. But it is Afghanistan that now looms as the potential quagmire.

It's certainly worth questioning to what degree the Democrats' enthusiasm for the fight in Afghanistan has been an effort to protect their right flank while opposing the war in Iraq. This isn't so say that this fight isn't necessary, but it's going to be far more painful than most of its supporters realize.

For what it's worth, the U.S. escalation in Afghanistan has, to a large extent, already begun.

That's how the president-elect plans to take the oath of office. He confirmed that he would include his middle name in an interview yesterday:

“I think the tradition is that they use all three names, and I will follow the tradition, not trying to make a statement one way or the other. I'll do what everybody else does.”

According to Mike Allen, that's not actually true, but it's still encouraging that Obama no longer has to hide his own middle name.

Al Gore is in Chicago today meeting with President-elect Obama to talk about "energy, climate change, and job creation." This has raised speculation that Obama plans to appoint him as a special "climate czar."

However, it's far more likely that Obama is just consulting with Gore on his upcoming choice for secretary of energy. Gore's staffers have made it clear that he has no intention of joining the administration:

"Vice President Gore feels now that his calling really is to educate Americans about the climate crisis," Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said Tuesday morning.

"He served for 30 years in electoral politics in the House, Senate and as vice president and surely understands the great importance of serving in those types of roles and in public service, but just feels now that his calling is in educating the public and in the roles that he's serving now at the Alliance for Climate Protection."

I find this disappointing. It was one thing for Gore to take up the role of climate change evangelist when he had just lost an election and frankly didn't have much else to do. His message resonated more than anyone could have anticipated and he picked up a Nobel Peace Prize, on Oscar, and made himself a very wealthy man along the way.

But now, Gore finally has a president who's largely sympathetic to his message and it's hard to believe that he really has more of an impact as a spokesman than he would with a role in government. Folksy commercials about wind farmers stickin' it to "the boys in Tehran" aren't going to cut carbon emissions. But a serious cap-and-trade system possibly could. Getting such a system in place is going to take someone with some serious political chops, for instance, a guy with over 15 years of experience in congress and eight in the White House.

Al Gore's been a great international spokesman. But the climate crisis doesn't need its own Bono, it needs a serious and capable political leader. It's time for the Gore-acle to get his hands dirty again.

Bill Clinton has agreed to scale back his activities with the Clinton Global Initiative and disclose his donors list, but as Politico reports, he still has an awful lot of leeway for activities that could give the president-elect headaches down the road:

He can still give speeches around the world and pull down six-figure speaking and consulting fees.

He can still ask for multi-million dollar checks to fund the Clinton Foundation’s work.

His foundation can host big events overseas and accept major contributions from foreign governments to fund its international disease-fighting, development and environmental initiatives.

And if he wants to do something that makes ethics officials at State uneasy, they can flag their concerns to the Clintons, but likely won’t be able to veto Bill’s proposed activities, experts say.

If his controversial speech in Malaysia last week was any indication of his future activities, it could be a fun four years to cover the State Department.

Photo: MIKE CLARKE/AFP/Getty Images

Watch the video from last night's show here: