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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Here's the latest on Obamaland:

• Retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki is being tapped to head the Veterans Affairs Department. A former Army chief of staff, Shinseki famously warned the U.S. Congress in February 2003 that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed in Iraq.
• Jared Bernstein, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, has been selected as Vice President-elect Joe Biden's economic advisor.
  
  "Jared Bernstein is an acclaimed economist, and a proven, passionate advocate for raising the incomes of middle class families. His expertise and background in a wide range of domestic and international economic policies will be an invaluable asset to the Obama-Biden Administration," Biden said in a statement.
  
  Bernstein is also a former deputy to former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. His most recent book is called Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries). He's a prolific commentator  -- see his Huffington Post columns here -- and a noted skeptic on free trade.
• California Rep. Xavier Becerra is Obama's choice for U.S. Trade Representative, but he reportedly is not sure he wants the job. He's another skeptic when it come to free trade, having said he regretted his vote in favor of NAFTA and having led the opposition to CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement.
• Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had this to say about the pick of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state: "I think if there is good strategic direction from the center, namely from the White House, and she is its executor, I would say yes. But if she is on her own and asserts her own sort of autonomy and tries to run foreign policy on her own, then I think it is legitimate to ask, well, what exactly are her strategic views, how consistent are they with the president's -- in some instances we know they were quite different -- and can she really pull it off on her own?"

Five-plus years after the invasion of Iraq, here's some shock and awe for you: The 751-page report released today by the congressionally funded Project on National Security Reform. The product of two years of work, their conclusions are grim... albeit with a silver lining.

First, the bad news. The United States' national security system is antiquated, "grossly imbalanced," incapable of cooperating agency-to-agency, and unable to "help American leaders to formulate coherent national strategy," according to the report. National security agencies compete rather than working together, so decisions are delayed and watered down. Since budgets get doled out by agency, departmental goals often outweigh the big picture.

No U.S. president -- no matter how wise and sleep-deprived -- could possibly get a handle on that system. 

Here's the good news: Barack Obama can fix it. Maybe.

The report offers some dramatic and common-sense reforms to get the system back in check -- starting with interagency cooperation. It calls for a central security budget based on projects, not agencies. It would merge the personnel and security clearance schemes across the government. Top officials from each agency would work on meta-teams for security issues. And the report recommends creating a new, central council so that the president can make sense of it all -- replacing the National Security and Homeland Security councils.

With any luck, the report's authors hope, the new administration will get to fixing this mess sooner rather than later. The Project on National Security Reform's executive director, James R. Locher III, tells FP in Seven Questions this week that now might be the time. It so happens that retired Gen. James L. Jones, tapped Monday to be the Obama's national security advisor, is a former member of the report's "guiding coalition" (basically, a steering committee). Two other big names who served on the coalition, former Clinton deputy James B. Steinberg and retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair, might also make it onto Team Obama. Check it out.

There seems to be a consensus in Washington about the United States' need to engage in talks with Iran. But how and when? Peter Baker reports on the debate brewing over this latter question:

Two leading research groups plan to issue a report Tuesday calling on him to move quickly to open direct diplomatic talks with Iran without preconditions.

The report by the groups, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations, urges Mr. Obama to put all issues on the table with Iran, including its nuclear program. The proposal calls for "swift early steps" to exploit a "honeymoon" period between his inauguration and the internal political jockeying preceding Iran's presidential elections in June.

The report breaks with experts on Iran who say Mr. Obama should wait until a clear winner emerges in Iran and calls instead for "treating the Iranian state as a unitary actor rather than endeavoring to play its contending factions against one another." The report also calls on him to back Israeli peace talks with Syria.

Karim Sadjadpour, a prominent Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has been arguing that the United States should "refrain from any grand overtures to Tehran" until after the Iranian elections. Sadjadpour worries that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president, would otherwise be able to say that his hardline policies brought the Great Satan to its knees.

The trick, then, is to show enough leg that you help bring a more responsible government to power in Tehran, but not so much that the United States looks weak. A delicate task, no doubt.

UPDATE: The report is here. 

So far, the media profiles of Barack Obama's future national security advisor, James L. Jones, have revealed an intelligent and stoic, John Wayne-looking guy with a talent for navigating complex bureaucracies, but tell us very little about his actual views on major world issues.

So, who is this former Marine general who just snagged the top foreign-policy position in the White House? Jones's reputation as a critic of the Bush administration's foreign policy is based largely on reports he has authored on coalition progress in Afghanistan and the state of the Iraqi armed forces (pdf). While scathing, these reports focused on strategy rather than offering an overall position on the wisdom of the mission.

But the Jones pick has already rubbed some Israeli hardliners the wrong way. Jones has criticized Israeli security policies, and expressed support for a NATO peacekeeping force in the West Bank. The New Republic's Eli Lake sees Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton butting heads over Middle East policy. While there's certainly a difference in tone, I'm not sure there's enough evidence yet to suggest that "Jones-Clinton tensions may reprise the great Powell-Cheney fights of yore."

That seems to be the case with Jones's record in general. Over the last eight years, the general has demonstrated a willingness to express highly critical, sometimes politically incorrect assessments on U.S. policy, but has steered clear of big ideological debates. Jones's thin paper trail may worry partisans, but with Clinton, Joe Biden, Robert Gates, and Susan Rice on his team, Obama probably has enough big egos with well-defined worldviews to advise him on foreign policy. He may be looking for a towering presence who can call BS on wrongheaded recommendations when necessary, a task the 6'4" Jones seems more than qualified to carry out.

Photo: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

David Ignatius:

The Bush administration once planned to announce the opening of an interests section in Tehran this month. That won't happen now, and the story illustrates the broken connection that is the U.S.-Iranian relationship.

An announcement set for September was delayed because of the Russian invasion of Georgia. But the proposal was back on track until a few weeks ago, when the administration became concerned about Iranian interference in negotiations with Iraq over a status-of-forces agreement. It seemed the wrong time for an opening to Tehran that Sunni Arab allies warned would be seen as a concession.

So now the issue of U.S.-Iranian relations will be handed over to the Obama administration. "We ran out of time," says one administration official. It's the most frustrating and dangerous bit of unfinished business the new administration will inherit.

Steve Clemons on the Gates reappointment:

My hunch is that Gates wants a chance to make the kind of leaps in the Middle East I have been writing about for some time. He wants to try and push Iran-US relations into a constructive direction. He wants to change the game in Afghanistan -- and the answer will not be a military-dominant strategy. He wants to try and stabilize Iraq in a negotiated, confidence building process that includes Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and other regional forces. And he wants to support a big push on Israel-Palestine peace and reconfigure relations between much of the Arab League and Israel.

Most of these ideas, regardless of whether Gates really intends to implement them, are worth exploring. I really, wonder, though, about the viability of a "big push on Israel-Palestine peace" at this point.

It hasn't gotten a lot of coverage, but the Palestinian Authority is in huge trouble right now. Hamas insists that Mahmoud Abbas's term as president expires on Jan. 9. For his part, Abbas is threatening to call presidential and parliamentary elections, the latter of which Hamas would deem illegal.

It's a huge mess, making it hard to imagine Israel engaging in serious negotiations, much less allowing a failed state to set up shop next door. As peace process veteran Aaron David Miller bluntly puts it, "The dysfunction and confusion in Palestine make a conflict-ending agreement almost impossible."

None of this means there is no hope in the region. First, I would keep the parties negotiating, even if it doesn't seem likely to lead anywhere. That's likely to be Hillary Clinton's thinking as well. "When he had a process going that kept Israelis and Palestinians talking to each other, people didn't die," she told Jeffrey Goldberg in 2006, referring to her husband.

Second, if I were Barack Obama, I'd probe the Syrians to find out what their price is for making peace with the Israelis. If it seems doable, I'd start laying the groundwork so that once the new Israeli government is in place, direct talks could quickly follow with the United States, not Turkey, as a mediator.

Claims that getting the Syrians to stop supporting Hamas will cause the Palestians to be less radical are probably overblown -- if anything, the exiled political leadership in Damascus is more pragmatic than the guys in Gaza -- but a Syria-Israel peace deal has its own logic. Syria has foolishly spurned such opportunities before, but it's worth a shot.

UPDATE: Miller weighs in further today with an op-ed in the Washington Post. He stresses that "it would be folly to go for broke" on the Arab-Israeli question, though it's worth keeping negotiations and security and economic aid to the Palestinians going. But the Syria track, though certainly no cakewalk, is definitely the better bet in his view.

Barack Obama, unfortunately, has a lousy record on ethanol subsidies. But now that he is no longer representing a corn state, perhaps he will listen to his new economic advisor, Larry Summers:

Appropriate steps include reform of misguided ethanol subsidies that distort grain markets to minimal environmental benefit, allowing farm land now being conserved to be planted[.]"