The headline on this story reads: "Obama will go to Copenhagen to clinch deal."

That's a touch misleading.

What the headline on this story should really read is: "Obama will go to Copenhagen if and only if his appearance is necessary in order to clinch a deal."

On one hand, this is good news. Even if the United States can't be a strong party in climate change negotiations, it is of vital importance that Obama act as a strong diplomat and negotiator on this issue. The whole world is at stake.

On the other hand, isn't this a bit rich? The U.S. slow-walk on this issue is part of the reason the Copenhagen negotiations have been so fraught. If a comprehensive agreement falters in December, the United States will be in no small part to blame. But its leader might parachute in at the last moment to save the day? Sigh.

LLUIS GENE/AFP/Getty Images

Tom Ricks shares an interesting theory from researcher Kyle Flynn about why the Obama administration is delaying a decision on a new Afghanistan strategy:

Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. 

I'm not sure I buy this. I doubt most voters have Afghanistan on the mind when they decide whether they should pull the lever for Jon Corzine or his Virginia counterpart Creigh Deeds. It's possible that there could be some protest votes from people infuriated with the White House's decision, but while Afghanistan is increasingly becoming "Obama's war," I don't think most people see it as the "Democrats' war."  If anything, most of the opposition to an increased U.S. commitment comes from within Obama's own party.

Looking ahead to 2010, this raises the quesiton of how big a campaign issue Obama's Afghan strategy will be. Because this debate doesn't divide easily along party lines, the political questions are pretty complicated.

If Obama to go along with the McChrysrtal plan, it seems unlikely that the majority of Americans who oppose the war would vote for Republicans as a result. Some antiwar voters might choose to stay home out of apathy but it seems like the partisan fury brought on by the healthcare debate alone should be enough to drag them to the polls. If Obama chooses a more limited strategy, I can't image there are that many voters who would have gone Democrat but see Afghanistan as a dealbreaker.

I'm also not convinced that, despite the increased concern, Afghanistan will a dominant politicial issue in U.S. politics in 2010. Even with 40,000 more troops, the total number will be nowhere near the half million that were deployed at the height of the Vietnam war. Unless you know someone in combat, the war in Central Asia is still a farily abstract concept compared with, say, healthcare. And given that it's much more clear what side everyone's on, healthcare makes much better material for attack ads.  

So while it's probably true, as it is frequently pointed out, that there's no political upside to the war in Afghanistan, the downside may not actually be that big. Whether or not that's a good thing is a whole other question. 

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

I don't quite understand the point of this:

U.S. President Barack Obama asked Spain to pass Cuba a message on the need for democratic reform when he met Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero earlier this month, according to a U.S. official....

"When (Obama) learned that Foreign Minister Moratinos was about to go to Havana, he suggested that Moratinos urge the Castro regime to take steps to reform and improve human rights," the U.S. official said on Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity....

The U.S. request to deliver a message to Cuba was first reported by Spain's El Pais newspaper, which said Obama talked of a potential turning point in the relationship with Havana, but said it was important for Cuba take some steps.

"Have (Moratinos) tell the Cuban authorities we understand that change can't happen overnight, but down the road, when we look back at this time, it should be clear that now is when those changes began," Obama told Zapatero, according to diplomatic sources quoted by El Pais.

 I have a feeling that after half a century, the Castro brothers probably realize that the U.S. doesn't much like the way they run their country and don't need the Spanish foreign minister to tell them. And if Obama has something new to say to the Cuban regime, why can't he say it himself, if not through his own envoy than through a letter.

It sends a pretty strange message that the administration is unwilling to have any direct contact with the Cuban regime, even just to admonish them, but seems to have no problem with other countries doing it. 

Anyone notice how you can describe almost any international trip by the vice president with the following madlib: "Vice President Joe Biden traveled to [U.S. ally] to reassure leaders that they had not been abandonded despite [larger foreign-policy priority.]"?

Check out these examples from the New York Times:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. left Washington on Tuesday for a three-day swing through Eastern Europe, hoping to reassure NATO allies that the United States has not abandoned them despite the decision to reshape a planned missile defense system.

-Peter Baker, Oct. 20

Wrapping up a diplomatic mission to Baghdad, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Iraqi leaders told him privately that they feared President Obama had pushed Iraq “to the bottom of the shelf” to make way for other, more pressing concerns like the war in Afghanistan.

But, Mr. Biden said, he reassured them that was not the case.

-Sheryl Gay Stolberg, July 5

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will travel to Ukraine and Georgia after President Obama visits Moscow next month in a trip designed to reassure Russia’s embattled neighbors that the new administration will not abandon them as it seeks to improve ties with the Kremlin.

 -Peter Baker, June 22.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived here for a seven-hour visit on Friday to assure Lebanese leaders that the sovereignty of this small but strategic Middle Eastern state would not be sacrificed in any future regional peacemaking efforts.

-Robert F. Worth, May 22

Mr. Biden met with top Bosnian leaders on Tuesday, on the first day of a trip through the Balkans that is intended to draw attention to the unfinished business in the region and the Obama administration’s commitment to helping the countries move beyond their recent history of violence and into the European mainstream.

The Balkans all but fell off the American agenda after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “We are back,” Mr. Biden said. “We will stand with you.”

 

-Nicholas Kulish, May 19.

Kulish loses some points for not using the word "reassure," but we'll cut him some slack since it was early in the adminsitration.  

It does make one wonder, at what point are U.S. allies no longer going to be reassured when Biden shows up?

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Ask anyone who watches Sudan policy in Washington about the Obama administratin's special envoy to the country, J. Scott Gration, and one phrase will keep popping up: "He's wandered way off the reservation."

A scathing profile of Gration in the Washington Post today makes all too clear why. What's his strategy? "We've got to think about giving out cookies...Kids, countries -- they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.

Gration, a former Air Force Major General, has angered just about everyone he could have -- except the Sudanese government (their embassy raved about him when I visited earlier this year). Sudan watchers worry about Gration's engaging approach to Khartoum, getting cozy with a government whose president is indicted for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. Human rights activists think that Gration risks not just overseeing inertia in Darfur but sparking another round of combat. In trying to "unite" the rebels, they note, he has favored certain factions over others -- a dangerous recipe in a volatile cocktail of conflict. Aid workers on ground say he doesn't understand what is going on. And colleagues at the State Department say his office doesn't communicate with them, nor heed their  policy advice.

At best, he's a headache, they say.

Now, even Congress is concerned. "[I]n recent weeks, the leadership of South Sudan and Darfur have expressed serious concerns about Special Envoy Scott Gration's warm and incentive driven approach toward the ruling National Congress Part (NCP)," members of the House's Sudan Caucus wrote in a letter to President Obama. They add at the end: "It is...important that the Special Envoy's office coodinate and work closely with the State Department..."

Why is all this coming out now? This week will see a meeting among administration officials who will at last approve a long-awaited Sudan Policy Review. Gration's critics are hoping other officials can reign him in. Gration's team told a blogger round table that I attended earlier this month that everything had already been agreed upon, and this meeting was a mere formality. 

The Enough Project, Save Darfur Coalition, and Genocide Intervention Network offered a stark warning after the WaPo profile: “The quotes from Special Envoy Gration are deeply troubling. The time is well past for the President, Vice President and Secretary of State to exert much-needed leadership over U.S. diplomatic efforts with Sudan or face the prospect that Sudan will descend into much broader violence.”

Meanwhile, Gration is just back from Sudan, and off to Moscow soon.

Update: The White House says the Washington Post profile inaccurately reflects their policy toward Sudan. This post has also been updated to correctly reflect Gration's travel schedule.

Photo: PETER MARTELL/AFP/Getty Images

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi thinks it's hilarious to call black people "tanned," and he's just going to keep on doing it:

"I bring you greetings from a person who is called...a person who is sun-tanned...Barack Obama," the smiling 72-year-old politician told a crowd of cheering supporters in Milan on Sunday.

"You wouldn't believe it, but they go sunbathing at the beach together - his wife is also sun-tanned."

Berlusconi first got in trouble for calling Obama "sun-tanned" last November.

If any of you are gamblers, an Irish bookie is now taking bets on who Berlusconi will insult next.  Here are the odds:

3/1      Angela Merkel
7/2      Muammar al-Gaddafi
4/1      Gordon Brown
5/1      Nicolas Sarkozy
6/1      Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
7/1      The Pope
8/1      Kim Jong-il
14/1    Dmitry Medvedev
18/1    Hu Jintao
18/1    The Queen
25/1    Kevin Rudd
33/1    Stephen Harper
20/1    Brian Cowen

[W]e need to be realistic in recognising that the campaign will require a sustained, substantial commitment. Many tough tasks loom before us — including resolution of the way ahead after the recent election, which obviously has been marred by allegations of fraud. The challenges in Afghanistan clearly are significant. But the stakes are high. And, while the situation unquestionably is, as General McChrystal has observed, serious, the mission is, as he has affirmed, still doable. In truth, it is, I think, accurate to observe that, as in Iraq in 2007, everything in Afghanistan is hard, and it is hard all the time.

Iran constitutes the main state-based threat to stability in the region. The impact of its malign activities and harsh rhetoric are felt throughout the Arabian Peninsula, making it, ironically, the best recruiter with prospective partners. We now have eight Patriot missile batteries spread across countries on the western side of the Gulf, where two years ago we had far, far fewer.

If Cecil Rhodes was correct in his wonderful observation that “being an Englishman is the greatest prize in the lottery of life”, and I’m inclined to think that he was, then the second greatest prize in the lottery of life must be to be a friend of an Englishman, and based on that, the more than 230,000 men and women in uniform who work with your country’s finest day by day are very lucky indeed, as am I.

Petraeus also gave an address at London's Policy Exchange think tank, saying, "The challenges in Afghanistan are significant, but the stakes are also high, and while the situation unquestionably is serious, the mission is still do-able." (See the AfPak Channel for more.)

Sending Petraeus to rally British support makes sense, but it makes me wonder why the Obama adminsitration hasn't used Petraeus -- certainly the most well-known military officer in the country and a bona fide pop-culture icon -- to pitch the Afghanistan strategy to the U.S. public.

The media-savvy general seemed to be everywhere during the later Bush years defending the Iraq surge. But Petraeus has been out of the spotlight lately and the job of "selling" Afghanistan seems to have been left to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen and the previously unknown Stan McChrystal. With the Pentagon worried about declining public support for the war, it seems odd that they haven't pulled out the big guns, so to speak. 

CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/Getty Images

Somewhat lost in the discussion of whether the United States is betraying its Central European allies by scrapping the planned missile shield, is just how difficult it was to get Poland and the Czech Republic to sign on to the project in the first place.

Around 70 percent of Czechs opposed the idea of hosting the radar system for the missile shield and the final treaty faced strong opposition in parliament. The Polish public was more supportive of the idea, but their government held out for months on agreeing to host the missile interceptors, only signing on after the Bush administration agreed to fund an extensive military modernization program.

Back in February, when today's news began to look like a foregone conclusion, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski acknowleged as much: 

“What we would like to be honored is what went along with” the missile-defense system, [Radoslaw] Sikorski, 46, said in an interview yesterday during a visit to Washington that included a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “We paid quite a political price for the agreement, both in terms of internal politics and in our relations with Russia.”  

Hopefully the Obama administration will acknowledge this political price and continue (or even expand) defense assistance to both the Czech Republic and Poland. But despite the grumbling in Warsaw and Prague today, the diplomatic damage to the U.S in these countries may not be all that significant. 

On Sunday, the NYT's Peter Baker noted that only 304 of 543 appointed positions have been filled by the Obama administration after nearly a year. Though some of the hold-up has been from petty pork-barrel politics in the Senate, much more has resulted from the White House's incredibly tough preemptive vetting of its own appointees.

This vetting, which has already stopped Paul Farmer from heading USAID, has been defended by the White House, which argues it is ahead of the historical precedent. Why isn't that reassuring? 

Even less reassuring is David Herbert's report in the National Journal that the State Department struggling to get security clearances for its interns in time for the periods they were supposed to be working.

One would-be intern, a graduate student at Tufts, came to Washington in May for a summer gig working on development issues. But he never got his security clearance and never started his internship. He's driving home to New York today after spending a frustrating summer spent calling his congressmen for help and wondering what happened.

"With the clearance process, as an applicant, you don't know anything," he said.

Not only are some going home without ever starting, the State Department actually takes this into account when choosing its number of interns. Don't we need to attract more talent into civil service, not scare it off with bureaucracy?

Even worse, the prospective interns most likely to run into delays are those who have spent time living or studying overseas, according to Daniel Hirsch, co-founder of Concerned Foreign Service Officers:

The Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which handles clearances, farms out most investigations to contractors, who are more efficient at processing applications than the bureau's agents, he said. But when an applicant has lived or traveled extensively overseas (as Buniewicz and others interviewed have), Diplomatic Security (DS) takes over. "Most DS agents consider [personnel security background investigations] to be beneath them, and security clearance investigations are a very low priority item for most overseas DS agents, so they probably sit on the back burner for a while," Hirsch said. 

So it is harder to get an early jump on a career at the State Department if you already have international experience. No wonder Paul Farmer gave up on the bureaucratic route.

As a side note, why do interns require such significant security checks? The old joke about interns running everything notwithstanding, are they really handling that much classified material? Any State interns out there, let us know. 

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Over on the AfPak Channel and Stephen Walt's blog, a fight is brewing over the U.S. recommitment of troops and resources to war in Afghanistan.

Here's the battle in a nutshell. The Obama administration -- despite questions raised by eminences grises on Afghanistan, such as Harvard's Rory Stewart -- has chosen to double-down.

Walt argues that Obama's contention --"left unchecked the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans" -- is a myth. Therefore, realists should recognize it hardly justifies remaining in Afghanistan.

Not so, argue the AfPak Channel's Peter Bergen and NYU fellow Paul Cruickshank -- the Taliban do and would provide cover for al Qaeda, justifying the U.S. presence. (Here's a one-time tag for responses from within FP.)

We'll post more replies from other bloggers as they come in -- here's Windy security reporter Spencer Ackerman, for starters. If you've blogged it, leave it in comments!

The new U.S. ambassador to Britain, Louis Susman, has indicated he will not pay the 3.5 million pounds ($5.7 million!) in congestion charges the embassy owes the City of London. 

Drivers pay 8 pounds a day for the privilege of driving in a central zone at peak hours -- but the U.S. embassy has refused to pay. The argument? The congestion charge is a tax, not a service fee. And embassies don't pay taxes. 

The mayor's office and Transport for London, which administers the program, argue that around three-quarters of embassies pay the charge -- a service, not a tax -- and that the United States should do better than to rely on semantics to wiggle out of it. 

I tend to think of congestion charges as taxes. They're designed to encourage certain behaviors and to make money for local governments. London spends the program's surplus (around a third of revenue, or nearly 90 million pounds, in 2007) on transport investment, for instance. But this still seems a little unseemly. What do you think?

Are voters more inclined to pitch their support to a candidate who looks comfortable kissing babies? It sure seems to have worked for Obama. But what about candidates who have babies?

Rumors that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his lovely wife Carla Bruni are planning to have their first child together in 2011 are spreading around France. The more vicious slant of this gossip is that the couple is orchestrating the pregnancy to secure Sarkozy's reelection.  

The chatter comes from the French magazine Voici, which claims the story "has been circulating for several weeks" and that France's first couple is going to use the "'pregnancy card' ... to ensure public sympathy ahead of the next presidential campaign in 2012."

That's quite a charge, even for France's most amorous couple. Both Sarkozy and Bruni have children from prior relationships and while neither has announced plans for a pregnancy -- let alone such a well-timed delivery -- Bruni has said in the past that she'd love to have another child, and is open to adoption. (At 40 the former model has acknowledged conceiving may not be possible.)

There is something to be said for children and their ability to boost a candidate's image, painting him as the warm "family man." Some of the most beloved and iconic images to emerge from any president's time in the White House are those that feature the Kennedy children romping around the Oval Office. Sasha and Malia have certainly taken the world by storm with their adorableness and J.Crew ensembles. 

Perhaps Paris will soon hear the pitter-patter of little Sarko-Bruni pieds. But whether or not they'll be dancing to the tune of an election victory may rest on more substantial political matters. Or at least we can hope...  

PHILIPPE WOJAZER/AFP/Getty Images

"I guess if I was looking at it strictly from our viewpoint, the use of the government as a strong sanction is often pretty helpful in getting people into treatment," said Kerlikowske, who heads the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. "If the sanction becomes completely nonexistent I think that would be a concern, but I actually didn't read quite that level of de-facto (decriminalization) in the law."

"I would actually give this a bit of a wait and see attitude," said Kerlikowske. "I've always found about laws, whether they've been enacted by states or our own federal government, is that it is the application and the use of the law and how it's actually done" are key.

Kerlikowske was much more enthusiastic about Mexican President Felipe Calderon's tougher proposal, which would mandate treatment for first offenders through special drug courts. Still, the fact that a U.S. drug czar is this open to any decriminalization program from its drug-war ally, does seem significant. The United States publicly criticized a similar bill in 2006.

Kerlikowske disappointed marijuana legalization advocates last week by saying, "Legalization is not in the president's vocabulary, and it's not in mine." But Kerlikowske has previously explained that he does not in any way support legalization, but favors a treatment model over a law-enforcement approach. 

The question is whether the drug czar is going to back up his rhetoric with any real reform, especially at a time when the Obama administration has little political capital to spare. His measured response to the Mexican bill and presence at the release of a UN report, which praises Portugal's decriminalization program, may indicate that he's dipping his toe into this debate while making it very clear that legalization is out of the question. 

For now, drug law reform advocates will probably have to take a "wait and see attitude" toward him as well. 

UIS ACOSTA/AFP/Getty Images

I recently came across this ingeniously crackpot post on Alex Jones's popular conspiracy site, Infowars:

A major Ghanaian news outlet has been caught in a revealing slip-up after it reported that President Barack Obama’s recent visit to the African country was a return to his birthplace. [...]

Contained in an otherwise relatively mundane account of Obama’s recent visit to Ghana in the Daily Graphic news outlet is a sentence sure to raise eyebrows amongst people like journalist Jerome Corsi, who has been at the forefront of the Obama birth certificate scandal since well before the election.

The full paragraph reads, “For Ghana, Obama’s visit will be a celebration of another milestone in African history as it hosts the first-ever African-American President on this presidential visit to the continent of his birth.”

Why the Ghanaian news outlet would report that Obama was born on the continent of Africa, when this would instantly invalidate his entire presidency, is unclear.

I really love the idea that The Daily Graphic somehow got the scoop of the century and decided it belonged in paragraph four of their "otherwise mundane account." This would probably qualify as the most egregious instance of "burying the lede" in the history of newspaper journalism.

The paper seems to have corrected the error, but not before the claim made the rounds on message boards acress the interwebs, including the comment thread of this unrelated FP article.

In any event, I'm curious how people in Kenya (or is it Indonesia? I can't keep up.) are reacting to the birther phenomenon. Are they completely dismissive of the idea, or somewhat intrigued by the possibility of being Obama's birthplace? Any Passport readers abroad hearing anything interesting?