Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's demand today for a U.S. apology for " past crimes" against Iran reminded me of this bit from Geneive Abdo's recent FP piece on "Why Not to Engage Iran (Yet)" in which she remembers the last time the U.S. came close to apologizing to the Islamic Republic:

Each time an end to Iran’s estrangement with the United States appears to be in sight, various competing political factions try to ensure that it happens on their watch. Back in March 2000, when Mohammad Khatami was president, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came close to apologizing to Iran for the United States’ involvement in Iran’s 1953 CIA-backed coup. “[I]t is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs,” Albright said.

Instead of celebrating the historic gesture, Khatami’s rivals condemned the United States for not going far enough in extending a direct apology. I was living in Iran at that time and was able to witness up close the great fear among conservatives that Khatami and his reform movement would gain all the praise and harvest all the political capital for an improvement in relations with the United States. Thanks to these conservatives and the United States’ second thoughts, this never happened and Iranians’ hopes were dashed once again.

Incidentally, Abdo has written a brand new piece for FP on why it will take more than just pledges and interviews from Barack Obama to actually make diplomatic progress in the Middle East. Check it out.

Russian officials may be walking back a bit on earlier hints that they were suspending the deployment of missiles to the Kaliningrad region in response to Barack Obama's more conciliatory tone. Voice of America is reporting that senior Russian military officials have called the reports "premature":

They said Russia has not taken any practical steps to deploy the short-range Iskander missiles and therefore one can not speak of a suspension.

The earlier reports stated the Russia had made its decision after a phone call between Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in which the U.S. president promised to reexamine the U.S. missile shield program on its merits.

Previous statements indicate that Obama isn't a big fan of missile defense, but it would be hard for him to scrap the program entirely without looking weak and angering the Czech Republic and Poland, who have signed treaties to host the system.

The two leaders will likely discuss the issue in person at the G20 summit in April, but an unspoken arrangement in which the U.S. is in no particulary hurry to set up the shield and Russia is no particular hurry to set up its missiles without any options being taken off the table, might be the best conceivable outcome.

Photo: DMITRY ASTAKHOV/AFP/Getty Images

Depending on where you stand, President Barack Obama's Friday decision to lift the Mexico City Policy, better known as the global gag rule, was either wonderful or appalling. For the last seven years, the gag rule stipulated that charities promoting and supporting abortion services could not recieve funding from the U.S. Government. Now, they can. I say: it's about time.

My position is not drawn from either side of the abortion debate. It's drawn from what I saw as a reporter and as a person living in Nigeria. HIV/AIDS is the open secret there -- a growing problem with a whispered name.

To put it politely, the gag rule created a rift -- at times gaping -- between U.S. government-funded projects and those of private NGOs trying to prevent HIV infection. The U.S. government brought the buck -- President Bush's PEPFAR program boasted $39 billion for HIV/AIDS work -- but it also brought rules about how to get the work done. The foundations brought less money and a sometimes different approach. Both sides fought to win the support of the local government for their strategies. From what I saw, that debate could get ugly. Friends working in the field were frustrated and saddened by the result: inertia and politics, instead of posters and condoms.

There was one particular problem that brought it home for me. In 2006, a Nigerian lawmaker announced that 55,000 women die in the country each year from unsafe illegal abortions. The evidence was everywhere -- from women that my colleagues and I met to Nigerian films on exactly that topic.

What was the best way to get that statistic down? Some will say abstinence. But sex is not always a choice. It's in those situations where women seek -- or are forced by their partners to seek -- unsafe abortions. Some counseling and a sterile doctor's office would go a long way.

That's just one example. The real "gag" was that you didn't hear a lot of stories about birth control or HIV prevention in Nigeria. So my few are only the beginning. Maybe now we'll start to hear a few more.

Photo: TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images

Those cheese-eating French are already giving Barack Obama a hard time. No...really.

Apparently one of George W. Bush's last acts as president was to triple tariffs on French roquefort cheese. This was meant as retaliation for the longstanding French ban on U.S. beef imports. But as Charles Bremner notes, many French were quick to see it as Bush's final shot at the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" who had so aggravated him during the run-up to the Iraq war.

French roquefort producers, including anti-globalization icon and dairy farmer Jose Bove, are protesting the move to "hold roquefort hostage" and are demanding that Obama reverse Bush's decision. The French parliament is debating a measure to slap tariffs on Coca-Cola in "symbol against symbol" retaliation. As a not-so-subtle hint, the governor of the roquefort-producing Mid-Pyrenees region even sent Obama a deluxe box of roquefort (shown above) as a welcoming gift. Repealing the beef ban is out of the question for health reasons, say officials.

The last thing Obama wants right now is to get into a trade war with France over a last-minute decision by his predecessor, particularly when he's looking for French cooperation on far more pressing issues. But even the farmers seem to realize that the "cheese wars" are not particularly high on Obama's list right now. "The boy must have a lot of priorities," acknowledged the head of one agricultural union.

Umm...yeah. I would say so. And you probably shouldn't be calling him "boy" either.

Photo: PASCAL PAVANI/AFP/Getty Images

As Carolyn noted yesterday over at Madam S., Hillary Clinton's new State Department comes complete with a spiffy new State.gov. Not every aspect of virtual Foggy Bottom has seen change, however.

The State Department's official blog, Dipnote, still looks exactly the same as its Bush-era incarnation. This includes, unfortunately, its eye-straining white text on black background design. Given how little the blog has changed -- I'm guessing it's being written on the same content management system -- it's a bit jarring to see that all the posts written before the new editors took over on Jan. 20 have been deleted removed from the blog and put in an archive page.

I also can't help notice the conspicuous absence of Passport (or any of the new FP blogs) from Dipnote's new blogroll. The previous editors were nice enough to add us after some cajoling. I'm not sure if we were removed before or after the changeover.

As we've said before, there's no reason diploblogging can't work. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband's blog is a consistently good read, for instance. But blog readers are inherently skeptical of anything that looks like official boilerplate (as the Center for American Progress recently learned) and Dipnote never really provided much that wasn't available in mainstream media coverage. Perhaps the Obama folks will be able to shake things up a bit. For now, The Cable and Madam Secretary remain the blogosphere's go-to destinations for State Department news.

Chinese TV viewers got a truncated version of Barack Obama's inaugural address yesterday thanks to some skittish censors at the country state-run TV network:

The news channel of state broadcaster China Central Television broadcast the speech live early Wednesday local time, but appeared caught off-guard by Obama's reference to how earlier generations of Americans had "faced down fascism and communism."

The audio quickly faded out from Obama's speech and cameras cut back to the studio anchor, who seemed flustered for a second before turning to ask a U.S.-based CCTV reporter what challenges the president faces in turning around the economy.

Here's video of the cutaway from the invaluable Danwei.org:

 

Xinhua's Chinese translation of the speech also ommitted the reference to Communism as well as the section where Obama said that "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history."

So much for "unclenching your fist."

Just as FDR mastered radio, and JFK became the first television president, it looks like BHO is going to be the first true president of the Internet age. His spiffy new Web site is already up:

Here's the speech as prepared for delivery.

Enjoy.

Below, a word cloud of the most common words and phrases in Obama's address:

Past FP contributor Dmitri Trenin has an interesting piece in the Moscow Times sketching out some of the early Russia challenges President Obama will face. While he urges Obama to make a more serious effort to engage Russia on issues of mutual concern, he doesn't see a close relationship between leaders of the two countries as being all that important:

President George W. Bush's jovial camaraderie with then-President Vladimir Putin simulated -- rather than stimulated -- the relationship between the United States and Russia. The promise of a strategic partnership in the wake of Sept. 11 was mindlessly neglected because at the time preparing for the invasion of Iraq became the sole focus of the Bush White House. [...]

You will not need to aim for a close working relationship with your Russian counterpart. All too often, these attempts are treated suspiciously by the public and not adequately supported by the bureaucracy. You would do wise, however, to appoint an informal "Russia tsar" to direct U.S. relations with Russia.

Aside from the unfortunate title "Russia tsar," I think this is good advice. While world leaders should probably be able to work together constructively, it doesn't actually seem all that advantageous when they become personally close.

Bush always seemed frustrated that Putin, who he got along great with personally, was such a thorn on his side politically. On the other side, the close relationship between Bush and Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili seems to have given both leaders unrealistic expectations about how the other would behave in the run-up to last summer's war.

When Jon Stewart pressed Tony Blair about his continued support for Bush on the Daily Show, the former prime minister somewhat meekly responded, "I like him." In hindsight, many Britons would probably prefer that Blair hadn't gotten along so swimmingly with his American pal.

When leaders think a personal bond can be the basis of a bilateral alliance, they tend to wind up disappointed. Harry Truman's first impression of his Soviet counterpart at Potsdam was, "I think I can do business with Stalin. He's very honest, but he's also smart as hell."

Obama doesn't need to be friends with Putin. They don't even have to like each other. What the citizens of both countries should be hoping for is that they're clear with each other about national interests, especially when these interests are competing. And as Trenin points out, dialogue at the head of state level is of limited usefulness if its not backed by cooperation in the bureaucracy.

To my eyes at least, Obama's basketball-playing regular Joe act has always seemed a bit forced and at odds with the pricklier personality in his early writing. That's not necessarily a bad thing. After eight years of gregarious Texas charm which never led to particularly effective diplomacy, a bit of cerebral Chicago cool might be a welcome change.

Photo: Artyom Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images

With the violence in Gaza and the imminent changeover in administrations here in Washington D.C., terrorism experts told Foreign Policy in interviews today, Osama bin Laden apparently thought the time was right to deliver a message to both his supporters and his enemies.

An audio tape attributed to the al Qaeda leader appeared on an Islamist website early Wednesday morning. Although there has not been any independent confirmation of whether the voice on the tape is actually bin Laden's, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack stated that he had no reason to question the tape's authenticity.

The message called for jihad against Israel for its assault on Gaza. Addressing the Palestinian people, bin Laden stated: "We are with you and we will not let you down. Our fate is tied to yours in fighting the Crusader-Zionist coalition, in fighting until victory or martyrdom." He also publicly doubted the ability of the United States to continue its struggle, saying that "America is begging the world for money," and "the USA will not be as powerful as it used to be."

While the world's most wanted man hardly broke new ground with these pronouncements, the very fact that he recorded a message himself -- his first since last May -- shows that he is very much alive and intent on being a public antagonist to U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama.

"No matter how isolated bin Laden is, [the tape shows] that he is following current events and maintains the ability to comment on them and get his message out there," Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, told FP.

There is no issue in the Arab world that is the focus of more rage right now than the Israeli assault on Gaza, which has now claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Palestinians. Since al Qaeda has been unable to establish any actual presence in Palestine, bin Laden's tape is one of the terrorist organization's only available methods for being heard on the subject. "The Israel-Palestine conflict is, for many al Qaeda members, at the heart of their struggle, so they had to comment on it," noted Daniel Byman, a counterterrorism expert with the Brookings Institution. "The Arab world is riveted to what is going on in Gaza, and it is hard for them to remain on the sidelines."

Bin Laden is also likely interested in puncturing some of the hopes raised by Obama's upcoming inauguration, a message also delivered recently by th al Qaeda leader's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

"They're essentially saying that, despite Obama's talk about change, his administration will be the same old wine in a different bottle," said Hoffman. "The message is: Don't feel hope, don't be taken in. The United States is still doing horrible things to Muslims around the world, and al Qaeda will eventually be victorious."

Bin Laden also blames Bush for "the collapse of the economy," arguing that if the United States pursues its war against al Qaeda it will "drown in economic crisis." This is actually a persistent theme of bin Laden's rhetoric. Since 2002, bin Laden has claimed that the United States was on the verge of military and economic collapse, in much the same way that the Soviet Union was during its battles against the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. "He sees the West in fundamental decline, and believes that it is losing the ability to maintain the fight," explained Byman.

Bin Laden is about to outlast the U.S. president who vowed seven years ago to bring him in "dead or alive." Clearly, he's gearing up for the next one.

Photo: AFP/Getty Images

If Nicolas Sarkozy or Gordon Brown are hoping for a little Obama magic to rub off on them, they're going to have to find another venue. While U.S. ambassadors and their spouses are invited to attend the event, foreign leaders have been asked to stay home.

Photos by Sandy Choi

Four new names over at The Cable.

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.