There is much ground covered in Game Change and much that readers can take away from Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's history of the 2008 election. But as Bob Woodward suggested today on the set of Morning Joe, a reader's guide to the headline-grabbing book may also be in order.

The Washington Post news legend focused on the part of the book that personally caused me the greatest concern. While I understand the news value of Harry Reid's brainless quotes on dialect and skin tone, I was most surprised by the observation of one of Hillary Clinton's top aides that the New York senator lacked the character to be President of the United States.

A few thoughts in defense of Secretary Clinton:

A good deal of the interviews for Game Change were written in the summer of 2008. To put that time frame in perspective, that was at the end of one of the longest, most grueling primary seasons in modern history.

The Clinton campaign endured a long political death march along a blistering trail that led them from the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire to the bars and bowling alleys of Pennsylvania to the emotionally charged and historic Democratic Convention in Denver. By the end of that brutish season, even the most loyal Clinton supporter could have been excused for temporarily losing their judgment due to exhaustion. Perhaps, in a weak moment, a Clinton supporter lashed out at their boss and blamed her for their spending a year away from family and friends in lousy hotel rooms in godforsaken settings. Maybe this staffer was stunned by Hillary's failure to close the deal in Iowa or plan beyond Super Tuesday. Maybe, just maybe, this person said something to the authors that they no longer believe.

I hope that is the case. Because what I saw throughout Hillary's 2008 campaign was a candidate who kept fighting back even after being badly wounded in Iowa, negligently served by her staff, and treated miserably by a biased press corps.

Hillary Clinton received what should have been a knockout blow in the election season's first contest by finishing behind Barack Obama and John Edwards in Iowa. The press smelled blood and rushed in for the quick kill. Pollsters began predicting her demise days before voters marched into the voting booths in New Hampshire. Even Bill Clinton apologized to a group of college supporters the night before the election for not being able to make his wife younger, more exciting, and more articulate.

I thought the 48 hours before the New Hampshire primary were the most humiliating any national figure of Hillary Clinton's stature had to endure in recent political history. It was a political execution that was broadcast across the world in slow motion. And it was ugly.

But Hillary Clinton had other plans. The New York senator shocked every pundit and pollster from Manchester to Manhattan, outperforming the final NH polls by a dozen points or more.

For the next few months, the Clinton campaign took one body blow after another. The media coverage was deplorable. In fact, it was so biased in some quarters that more than a few living legends of broadcast news privately shared with me the embarrassment they felt toward their own profession.

Still, Clinton kept fighting on.

We were told that like New Hampshire, Ohio would be Hillary's Waterloo. After all, Obama was outspending her there by a margin of 4 to 1.

She still won.

Then we were told that Barack Obama's victory in Texas would seal the deal and make history.

Hillary won again, despite again being outspent 4 to 1.

Then pundits told America that West Virginia would be a battleground for the type of blue collar voters that helped put JFK on the path to the White House in 1960. If Obama won there, like another young senator, he would be on his way to the Oval Office.

But Hillary won yet again, this time by an astounding 41 points.

The battle next shifted to Pennsylvania, where the two candidates would have a month to make their case to voters. We were told that Pennsylvania would be where Obama would finish Hillary off. After all, the more people got to know Barack Obama, the more they would like him. And, well, the opposite would surely be true of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Working class voters across the Rust Belt got that chance to meet Hillary Clinton up close and personal. So did suburban moms, rural farmers, and urban dwellers. Hillary was dramatically outspent on TV and badly outmaneuvered by a brilliant Obama ground game.

But at the end of a Tuesday night in April of 2008, Hillary Clinton had once again picked herself up off the floor and won an election that shouldn't have been close. In fact, this one wasn't close, but it was Barack Obama who found himself on the wrong side of a lopsided margin.

In the end, history caught up with the Clinton campaign. Hers was a battle that was doomed from the beginning by a mistaken belief that the Clinton machine would have the Democratic nomination sealed by Super Tuesday. Given her party's rules for awarding delegates, it was a miscalculation that caused Hillary the Democratic nomination and most certainly the presidency of the United States of America.

Character is rarely revealed in its sharpest contrast after a glorious victory. Instead, you find out what a person is made of after they sustain a soul crushing defeat. In her long, tortured march toward Denver, Hillary Clinton showed more character, more resilience, and more true grit than any presidential candidate I can recall.

And in that losing cause, Secretary Clinton served as a great example of character not only for my young daughter, but for us all. It is that type of strength that we need in our leaders now more than ever.

By Joe Scarborough, The Huffington Post, January 12, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton kicked off a 10-day trip through the Asia-Pacific region today with a speech at the East-West Center, during which she pledged more work to strengthen relationships in the region - and to build new ones.

"The United States is back in Asia," she said. "I want to underscore that we are back to stay."

Clinton added that the United States is "inextricably linked" to Asia and the Pacific.

Clinton delivered the policy address on the U.S. vision for Asia-Pacific multilateral engagement at the East-West Center's Imin Center at 2 p.m.

During a question-and-answer session, Clinton also addressed the upcoming APEC conference in Honolulu next year.

She said the gathering of political leaders from across the region will showcase the Islands as a "model for the imagination, what could be in the 21st century in many of the countries that will be visiting."

She added, "The opportunity for Hawaii, which is such as meeting place for East and West, is just extraordinary. You have a lot of very smart experienced leaders ... and experts in this state who can put together a program that not only showcases the culture, the history, but the diversity."

The speech was not open to the public.

About 150 people were invited to the gathering, including Gov. Linda Lingle, former Hawaii governors, U.S. Sen. Dan Akaka and U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, and state lawmakers.

Clinton will leave the Islands for Australia tomorrow.

The East-West Center is a research organization founded 50 years ago by Congress to promote relations with Pacific nations.

Clinton, who arrived on Oahu yesterday afternoon, also visited Naval Station Pearl Harbor today and presented a wreath aboard the USS Arizona Memorial.

She was escorted by Lt. Gen. Daniel J. Darnell, deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Command.

This is the first stop of a 10-day trip for Clinton that will take her to Australia, New Zealand and Papua, New Guinea.

This week's trip is meant to strengthen U.S. relations with key partner nations in the western Pacific.

The Honolulu Advertiser, January 12, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed sympathy and pledged support for the victims of today's earthquake in Haiti.

"We are still gathering information about this catastrophic earthquake," she said before giving a speech at the East-West Center in Manoa. "The United States is offering our full assistance to Haiti and others in the region."

"We will be offering both civilian and military disaster relief. Our prayers are with the people who have suffered, their families and their loved ones," she said.

A magnitude 7.0 quake struck just 10 miles west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was the largest earthquake ever recorded in the area, and caused a hospital to collapse, according to initial reports.





By Susan Essoyan, Honolulu Star Bulletin, January 12, 2010

HONOLULU (AP) -- Rarely does Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton venture abroad without pushing the case for ''women empowerment,'' a signature issue of her nearly one-year tenure as the top U.S. diplomat.

On Wednesday, Clinton was flying across the Pacific to the tropical nation of Papua New Guinea, where women's rights will be high on her agenda.

After consulting on the Haitian earthquake with President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others in Washington on Wednesday morning, Clinton told reporters at her Honolulu hotel that she intended to carry through with her Pacific tour but would find a way to compress the schedule. She made an unscheduled stop at U.S. Pacific Command to extend her consultations on the disaster.

On numerous other overseas trips, Clinton has made a point of meeting with women who symbolize the promise of improving education, health and employment prospects for women. For example, in March she met with a group of female students in Ramallah, in the West Bank, to discuss women's achievements, including those of astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. On other stops she has highlighted programs -- some supported by U.S. funds -- promoting small business opportunities for women.

In Papua New Guinea, Clinton will be meeting with Prime Minister Michael Somare, who three years ago named Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, an honorary tribal leader. And she will attend an environmental protection event featuring mangrove replanting.

Papua New Guinea, which last saw a visiting U.S. secretary of state in 1998, is a collection of islands between the Coral Sea and the South Pacific Ocean. It includes the eastern half of the island of New Guinea.

Because she will be crossing the international dateline in flight, she won't arrive in Port Moresby, the capital, until Thursday afternoon local time, after a refueling stop in the Marshall Islands. She planned to spend about five hours there and move on to New Zealand in the wee hours of Friday.

Clinton spent two days in Honolulu, meeting Tuesday with her Japanese counterpart and delivering a speech on Asia-Pacific cooperation. In a question-and-answer session after the speech, Clinton was told by a Papua New Guinean woman that of the 109 seats in her country's parliament, just one is held by a woman. She asked Clinton how women could overcome cultural biases in male-dominated countries like Papua New Guinea.

''The barriers that restrain women's rights and responsibilities are legal in many places still; they are definitely cultural and to some extent political and social, and they are not easily removed unless there are enough women exercising leadership so that the barriers begin to just dissolve, and women see what is possible,'' Clinton said.

Clinton said that in Port Moresby she would meet with a group of female military officers and security officers.

Clinton told reporters traveling with her that the visit will be her first to the South Pacific island, whose first sighting by a European was by English Captain John Moresby in 1873. During World War II, thousands of Allied troops were based on Papua New Guinea.

The Obama administration is making a push to strengthen U.S. influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, January 13, 2010

Clinton weighs in on simmering dispute with Japan over future of US Marine base in Okinawa

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday the Obama administration feels assured of Japan's commitment to a continuing security alliance with the United States, even as Tokyo weighs abandoning a 2006 deal on a U.S. Marine air base.

"The Japanese government has explained the process they are pursuing to reach a resolution" on relocating the Futenma air station, "and we respect that," she told a news conference after meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada at a Honolulu hotel.

Clinton apparently received no explicit promise from Okada that Japan would not force Futenma off its territory entirely. The U.S. military views Futenma as critical to its strategy for defending not only Japan but also reinforcing allied forces in the event of war on the Korean peninsula.

Okada told reporters that he reiterated his government's pledge to reach a decision on relocation of Futenma by May. He said Tokyo would determine the future of the air station in a way that would have "minimal impact on the U.S.-Japan alliance."

In a nod to Japanese sensitivities, Clinton said it was important for the U.S. to maintain its role in contributing to stability in the Asia-Pacific region while keeping in mind the need to reduce the impact of jet noise and other inconveniences to local communities near U.S. bases.

Clinton also delivered a speech designed to clarify the Obama administration's views on modernizing the groupings of Asian and Pacific nations in ways that would enhance their cooperation on a wide range of issues, including regional security, trade and the environment.

Speaking on a hillside terrace at the East-West Center on the campus of the University of Hawaii, Clinton was met upon arrival by a few dozen protesters lining the street and shouting "End the wars!" and hoisting signs demanding that the U.S. withdraw its military forces from Okinawa. None attended the speech.

Clinton stressed that the first U.S. priority in the Asia-Pacific is to maintain the country-to-country alliances it already has, while exploring ways in which the United States can play a role in any new or reconfigured associations.

"The ultimate purpose of our cooperation should be to dispel suspicions that still exist as artifacts of the region's turbulent past," she said.

No country, including the U.S., should dominate in the region, she said. But the role of the United States is irreplaceable, she added.

"We can provide resources and facilitate cooperation in ways that other regional actors cannot replicate, or in some cases are not trusted to do."

She described the region as a source of potential instability.

"Asia is home not only to rising powers, but also to isolated regimes; not only to long-standing challenges, but also unprecedented threats," she said.

For decades the main U.S. ties to the Asia-Pacific region have been through security and trade agreements with individual countries, such as the 50-year-old security treaty with Japan that allows the basing of U.S. forces on Japanese territory.

The case of Futenma air station, on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, has become particularly sensitive. That it must be moved is not in dispute - the two countries signed a deal in 2006 to relocate it on the island. The problem is where to put it. And the U.S. position is that it cannot be shut down until a replacement is established elsewhere on Okinawa - an idea most Okinawans oppose.

A new left-leaning Japanese government that took office in September is reassessing the U.S.-Japan alliance.

It also is investigating agreements long hidden in government files that allowed nuclear-armed U.S. warships to enter Japanese ports, violating a hallowed anti-nuclear principle of postwar Japan. The findings are due out this month.

At her news conference with Okada, Clinton played down the friction over Futenma, stressing the many other areas of long-standing cooperation between the two countries. And she made clear that satisfying U.S. needs for the Marine base is equally in Japan's own interest.

"We look to our Japanese allies and friends to follow through on their commitments, including on Futenma," she said. "I know Japan understands and agrees that our security alliance is fundamental to the future of Japan and the region."

The Hawaiian setting for Tuesday's meeting, in the 50th year of the U.S.-Japan defense alliance, inevitably stirred memories of darker times. After her session with Okada, Clinton visited the World War II memorial to the sunken USS Arizona, which still lies in Pearl Harbor with its dead. She chatted briefly with two survivors and laid a wreath before a wall containing names of those who died on the ship.

Nearly 2,400 Americans were killed and almost 1,180 injured when Japanese fighters bombed and sank 12 naval vessels and heavily damaged nine others on Dec. 7, 1941. The Arizona, which sank in less than nine minutes after an armor-piercing bomb breached its deck and exploded in the ship's ammunition magazine, lost 1,177 sailors and Marines. About 340 of its crew members survived.

By ROBERT BURNS, The Associated Press, January 12, 2010

HONOLULU - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, embarking on her first diplomatic trip of 2010, will try to ease tensions with Japan, America's most important Asian ally, over a stalled agreement to relocate a Marine base on the island of Okinawa.

But she acknowledged that relations with the region's other major power, China, may be entering a rough period, as the United States pledges to sell weapons to Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, and President Obama plans a meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, over the objections of Beijing, which considers him a separatist.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to reporters Monday on her plane, said the United States and China had a "mature relationship," which she said meant that "it doesn't go off the rails when we have differences of opinion."

"We will provide defensive arms for Taiwan," Mrs. Clinton said. "We have a difference of perspective on the role and ambitions of the Dalai Lama, which we've been very public about."

Mrs. Clinton was traveling to Hawaii, her first stop in a nine-day trip that will include Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Australia. In Honolulu, she is scheduled to give a speech on United States security strategy in Asia, and to meet the Japanese foreign minister, Katsuya Okada.

Japan has frustrated and angered the Obama administration with its refusal to carry out a 2006 agreement to move a Marine Corps air station in Okinawa to a less populated area of the island.

Mrs. Clinton sought to play down the dispute, saying the alliance was "much bigger than any one particular issue."

Japanese-American relations have been unsettled since August, when voters in Japan swept out the long-entrenched Liberal Democratic Party in favor of the slightly left-leaning Democratic Party, led by Yukio Hatoyama. Mr. Hatoyama spoke of forging closer ties to Asian neighbors like China, prompting concerns in Washington that Japan was pulling away from its close relations with the United States.

President Obama tried to reduce tensions when he visited Tokyo in November. But after he left, Mr. Okada pushed for a government inquiry into secret agreements with the United States in the 1960s and 1970s that allowed American aircraft and ships with nucelar weapons to enter Japan.

Most of the tension is rooted in the dispute over Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. The Obama administration wants Japan to honor a 2006 agreement to move the base to a less populated part of Okinawa. But Mr. Hatoyama campaigned to move it off the island or even out of Japan.

Mrs. Clinton said the bumps were aftershocks from Japans political earthquake. "You can imagine what it would be like in our own country, if after 50 years a party that had never held power, actually held it," she said.

In her first visit to Beijing as secretary of state last February, Mrs. Clinton played down human rights concerns and emphasized cooperation on issues like trade and climate change. But on Monday, she took a tougher line, saying that Washington was a necessary counterweight to Beijing.

"People want to see the United States fully engaged in Asia, so that as China rises, there's the presence of the United States as a force for peace and stability, as a guarantor of security," Mrs. Clinton said.

She also called on China to use its influence to force North Korea back into negotiations on relinquishing its nuclear weapons. North Korea said Monday that it would not return to those talks unless sanctions against it were lifted, and it was able to negotiate a formal peace treaty with the United States to replace the 1953 truce that ended the Korean War.

Returning to those multiparty talks, she said, was a precondition for dealing with other issues.

Starting her second year as the nation's chief diplomat, Mrs. Clinton spoke more about pressure than diplomatic engagement.

Speaking of Iran, she said the United States and its allies were discussing financial sanctions that would appear to be aimed at the Revolutionary Guards and other political players in the country, should diplomacy fail.

"It is clear that there is a relatively small group of decision makers inside Iran," she said. "They are in both political and commercial relationships, and if we can create a sanctions track that targets those who actually make the decisions, we think that is a smarter way to do sanctions."

But she added, "All that is yet to be decided upon."

By Mark Landler, The New York Times, January 11, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has logged more air miles in her first year on the job than most people do in a lifetime, but for one member of Congress, that's not quite enough.

Del. Eni Faleomavaega (D-American Samoa) is ticked off that Clinton isn't planning to stop by more Pacific Island nations during her three-day trip to the region later this week.

On Sunday he told the Samoa Observer that the perceived slight "shows a lack of sensitivity for the region."

Or perhaps just a lack of time: Clinton will visit three countries in about 72 hours, including Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

The lawmaker said Clinton's decision "sends a message that some 15 Pacific Island nations are not an important or integral part of our U.S. foreign policy objectives."

He also made an unflattering comparison between the U.S. and China, saying, "China takes the time to meet with heads of state from small Pacific Island nations ... [They] deserve something better than fly-by diplomacy."

Faleomavaega's frustration is at odds with the stated intent of Clinton's trip, as described last week by Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell.

Briefing reporters about the upcoming visit, Campbell said, "As many of you know, one of the efforts of the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton has been to step up our engagement in the Pacific Islands ... as part of this overall effort, she will be stopping in Papua New Guinea."





By Christina Wilkie, The Hill, January 11, 2010

In the gated Oman Embassy off Massachusetts Avenue, Washington's first female ambassador from an Arab country, Hunaina Sultan Al-Mughairy, sat at her desk looking over a speech aimed at erasing misconceptions about her Muslim nation.

A few blocks away inside a stately Dupont Circle mansion, India's first female ambassador in more than 50 years, Meera Shankar, huddled with top aides after her prime minister's state visit with President Obama.

Nearby, in a century-old residence with its own ballroom, Latin America's only female ambassador in Washington, Colombia's Carolina Barco, dashed back from talking up free trade on Capitol Hill to showcase her country's culture and food.

There are 25 female ambassadors posted in Washington -- the highest number ever, according to the State Department.

"This is breaking precedent," said Selma "Lucky" Roosevelt, a former U.S. chief of protocol.

Women remain a distinct minority -- there are 182 accredited ambassadors in Washington -- but their rise from a cadre of five in the late 1990s to five times that is opening up what had been an elite's men club for more than a century.

A key reason is the increase in the number of top U.S. diplomats who are women, what some call the "Hillary effect."

"Hillary Clinton is so visible" as secretary of state, said Amelia Matos Sumbana, who just arrived as ambassador from Mozambique. "She makes it easier for presidents to pick a woman for Washington."

Three of the last four secretaries of state -- the office that receives foreign ambassadors -- have been women.

Madeleine Albright became the first female U.S. secretary of state in 1997. Condoleezza Rice served from 2005 to 2009.

Clinton, now in her second year, is especially well-known abroad because of her stint as first lady and her presidential run; she is seen by many as a globetrotting champion of women's rights.

"The pictures of U.S. diplomacy have been strongly dominated by photos of women recently," Shankar said. "That helps to broaden the acceptance of women in the field of diplomacy."

Claudia Fritsche, the ambassador from Liechtenstein, a principality that only gave women the right to vote in 1984, said the Albright-Rice-Clinton sequence has "a worldwide effect. . . . It's inspiring, motivating and certainly encouraging."

Albright said that when she spoke to foreign ministers around the world they told her governments had started thinking, "We need a Madeleine."

Some American diplomats said the appointment of a woman can be a visible way for a country to signal that is modernizing and in step with the United States.

A woman's touch

For many countries, a Potomac posting is prized, landed only by seasoned diplomats and influential political players. More women now have those credentials, a reflection of women's advancement in many parts of the world.

Eleven of the 25 female envoys in Washington are from Africa. Four are from Caribbean nations. The others are from Bahrain, the Netherlands, Croatia, Kyrgyzstan, Singapore, Oman, Colombia, India, Liechtenstein and Nauru, an eight-square-mile Pacific island with only 14,000 people.

Heng Chee Chan, the Singaporean ambassador and the longest-serving female envoy in Washington, said it has been a "quantum leap" for women in diplomacy since she arrived here in 1996.

In the beginning, she said people just assumed she was a man. When a table was booked under "Ambassador Chan" and she arrived asking for it, she was told, 'Oh, he is not here yet.' "

Many said they are still often bypassed in receiving lines and the male standing beside them is greeted as "Mr. Ambassador."

"Even when I say I am ambassador, people assume I am the spouse," said Shankar, who has represented India in Washington for nearly a year.

More than half of new recruits for the U.S. Foreign Service and 30 percent of the chiefs of mission are now women, according to the State Department. That is a seismic shift from the days, as late as the 1970s, when women in the Foreign Service had to quit when they married, a rule that did not apply to men.

"It was outrageous," said Susan Johnson, president of the American Foreign Service Association. "The idea was that a married woman could not be available for worldwide service. She would be having children and making a home."

That thinking is still alive in many parts of the world. But as the U.S. Foreign Service moves away from being "pale, male and Yale," the diplomatic ranks elsewhere are diversifying, too.

Johnson said the rise in female diplomats coincides with what she sees as a shift in investment away from diplomacy and toward defense. "Is the relative feminization of diplomacy indicative of its decline as a center of power and influence?" she wonders.

But she and others welcome the change and say it will have an impact.

Cathy Tinsley, executive director of Georgetown University's Women's Leadership Initiative, said gender diversity at the top of any organization leads to better decisions. When all the decision-makers have a similar background and mind-set, they can "amplify the error."

Barco, a mother of three who has served as Colombia's foreign minister, said capability and preparation -- not gender -- are what count. She held 630 meetings on Capitol Hill last year to lobby for a free trade agreement with the United States.

But several female ambassadors said they often bring a different perspective to discussions than their male counterparts and tend to focus more on certain issues such as poverty and lack of schooling for girls.

Shankar credited female leaders with turning the world's spotlight on the marginalization of Afghan women, and several U.S. diplomats said that since women have run the State Department, U.S. embassies have emphasized collecting information on rights abuses against women worldwide.

Several female ambassadors from developing countries said they are attentive to issues affecting families, such as health care and the lack of safe drinking water.

Albright said she guards against saying that women focus on "soft issues." "They are often the hardest issues: poverty, discrimination, education and health," she said.

Female envoys often pool their power to land meetings with busy U.S. senators or media personalities. A group recently met with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"There is a female kinship," Liechtenstein's Fritsche said, in her chic Georgetown embassy with its crushed-glass floor and rooftop views of the Potomac.

No matter that Washington has often been described as a "boys' club," said Barco, being a woman does have its advantages. For one thing, you get noticed.

And Chan said because of male-female seating patterns, she often gets prime spots, including next to George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger.

While male ambassadors are usually accompanied by wives, female ambassadors are often here alone. Of eight interviewed, four are divorced and four said their husbands did not accompany them to Washington because of their own jobs.

Angele Niyuhire, 47, who arrived this fall as the new ambassador from Burundi, said her husband felt he could not leave his construction business. "It's considered normal if a woman goes with her husband but it's not seen as the same if a husband goes," she said.

So she moved to Bethesda with her two teenage daughters to run her small embassy out of a second-floor office on Wisconsin Avenue.

In Burundi, "a woman's traditional role is [to] take care of the house," Niyuhire said, but "if we women want to assume responsibility, we can't say, 'No, I am not going to take that job because my husband can't come.' "

Sumbana, a founding member of the Mozambique Red Cross and former member of the national parliament who arrived as ambassador a couple of months ago, said sometimes the men making appointments are overly concerned about what the husbands will do. "There is a tendency for men to think for women. They think, 'How can we post this woman? What would we do with her husband? How will the husband feel with his wife in a higher position?' "

Her husband stayed at his job in Mozambique.

Ambassadors' wives have historically played a huge role in entertaining -- a key part of an envoy's job -- so that duty falls to the female ambassadors. "We need a wife, too!" several remarked.

"It's a disadvantage that I am here by myself," said Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, the ambassador from Bahrain since 2008. Her husband and 17-year-old son live in Bahrain and her older son studies in London. "But that means I can work late and not feel guilty."

As Bahrain's first female ambassador to Washington and the first Jewish ambassador from an Arab country, Nonoo has become a well-known face back home. The former managing director of a computer company said being a woman helps erase misconceptions about women in her Persian Gulf country.

Nonoo and Al-Mughairy, Oman's ambassador, have both been questioned at forums about whether women in their countries are allowed to drive, a restriction in some parts of the Arab world but not in their nations.

"Oman has three cabinet members who are women," said Al-Mughairy, an economist. She recently wore a pink thob, a traditional dress, as she greeted hundreds of U.S. business and government officials who came to the Willard Hotel to celebrate her country's national day.

Being a female ambassador, Al-Mughairy said, "opens doors for me. People are curious to see me."

By Mary Jordan, The Washington Post, January 11, 2010

Why another book on the 2008 campaign, a year after the inauguration of President Obama? What more is there to say about a race that was covered day in and day out by newspapers, magazines, television, radio and bloggers? Is there anything more to learn about the candidates - and does it matter to an American public now focused on unemployment and health care and terrorism?

The veteran political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin think they do have something new to say. "What was missing" from the wall-to-wall coverage and what "might be of enduring value," they write in their buzzy new book "Game Change," was "an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who (in our judgment) stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House."

They proceed in these pages to serve up a spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations - some that are based on impressive legwork and access, some that simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail, and some that it's hard to verify independently as more than spin or speculation on the part of unnamed sources. The authors mix savvy political analysis in these pages with detailed reconstructions of scenes and conversations they did not witness firsthand (like an exchange that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton had on a beach in Anguilla). They employ the same sort of technique Bob Woodward has pioneered in his best-selling books: relying heavily on "deep background" interviews, along with e-mail messages, memorandums and other forms of documentation to create a novelistic narrative that often reflects the views of the authors' most cooperative or voluble sources. Unlike Mr. Woodward's last two books this volume has no source notes at the end.

The authors write that one of Mrs. Clinton's "senior-most lieutenants" watched her "bitter and befuddled reaction" to her loss in Iowa, and thought for the first time, "This woman shouldn't be president." They write that during debate preps, some staff members assigned to Sarah Palin by the McCain campaign discussed the "threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable." They add that several of Senator John Mccain's lieutenants agreed that if it looked as if their candidate might actually win in November, they would have to discuss how to relegate Ms. Palin "to the largely ceremonial role that premodern vice presidents inhabited": "it was inconceivable" that "if McCain fell ill or died, the country be left in the hands of a President Palin."

In addition Mr. Heilemann, who works for New York magazine, and Mr. Halperin, for Time magazine, write that Mrs. Clinton, encouraged by her husband and aides, considered running for president in 2004 but ended up listening to her daughter, Chelsea, who argued that she needed to finish her Senate term. They write that Mr. Clinton and George W. Bush "spoke more often than almost anyone knew" - that "from time to time, when 43 was bored, he would call 42 to chew the fat." And they assert that Mrs. Clinton blew an opportunity to win the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy, who, they say, had been "dreading a call from Hillary" asking her to go to Iowa on her behalf, knowing, the authors write, that "once she had campaigned for Clinton, siding with Obama would be off the table." Instead of making the call herself, Mrs. Clinton had one of her staffers phone Ms. Kennedy, who ducked the call.

In another passage, which was widely reported over the weekend, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, encouraged Mr. Obama to run early on, arguing that "the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.' " Over the weekend Mr. Reid called the president to apologize for his choice of words. Other senators, including Charles E. Schumer, Byron L. Dorgan, Ben Nelson, Bill Nelson, Barbara Boxer and Edward M. Kennedy, the authors add, were also nudging Mr. Obama, then a senator, to take the plunge, though most would "root for Obama secretly," as they feared retribution from the Clintons should Mrs. Clinton eventually prevail.

Mrs. Clinton, long the front-runner in the race, was so confident of winning, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, that she went so far as to start thinking about her choice of a running mate in fall 2007: she "had already determined without a sliver of doubt that she was not going to choose Obama," they say, and told her aides that Evan Bayh, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Tom Vilsack and Ted Strickland were at the top of her short list. Around the same time, they write, Mrs. Clinton asked her friend Roger Altman, deputy Treasury secretary in her husband's administration, to lead a secret project - planning her transition to the White House based on the assumption that a year later she would win the general election.

Mr. Heilemann wrote incisively about Mrs. Clinton in the pages of New York magazine - chunks of his reportage and analysis, taken directly from his articles, appear in this book - and there is more revealing material about her and Mr. Clinton in this volume than the other candidates and their wives. The authors not only dissect the dysfunctional, conflict-ridden Clinton campaign - something that has already been done in detail by many other reporters - but they also emphasize that communication difficulties between the Clintons exacerbated that campaign's problems.

They write that Mrs. Clinton "couldn't bear to confront her husband directly" after his heated words about Mr. Obama caused an uproar in South Carolina, and asked aides "to implore him either to leave the state or to pipe down." They write that Patti Solis Doyle, Cheryl Mills and Howard Wolfson "formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill's libido." And they quote one "old Clinton hand" who suggests that Mrs. Clinton stayed in the primary race to the bitter end, because Mr. Clinton's approval mattered a lot to her, and "throwing in the towel would mark her as a failure in his eyes."

In a fascinating account about Mrs. Clinton's initial decision to decline the post of secretary of state, Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann paraphrase a conversation between the two former rivals in which, they contend, Mrs. Clinton brought up the Bill issue: "You know my husband, she said. You've seen what happens. We're going to be explaining something that he said every other day. You know I can't control him, and at some point he'll be a problem."

The authors describe the Obamas' marriage as a model one ("Obama adored his wife" and "didn't even bother to pretend that he enjoyed anyone else's company remotely as much as he relished being with her and their daughters"), but their portraits of the other candidates' contentious spousal relationships actually make the Clintons' partnership seem like a happy one in comparison.

Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write, for instance, that the strategist John Weaver suspected the rumor Cindy McCain had a "long-term boyfriend" in Arizona "was rooted in truth," and that the McCains "fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff." The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, that she never wanted him to run again for president, and that "when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth."

As for John and Elizabeth Edwards, the authors are even harsher. They describe in detail Mr. Edwards's infatuation with the video maker Rielle Hunter - whose behavior they call "freaky, wildly inappropriate, and all too visible," and they write that he continued to nurse delusional hopes of being named attorney general in an Obama administration even after the National Enquirer ran a photograph of him holding Ms. Hunter's new baby. In the wake of the first Enquirer story about Mr. Edwards's affair, the authors write, Mrs. Edwards "was sobbing, out of control, incoherent," and vented her fury on the "very aides who had kept the matter from mushrooming" further.

Edwards aides, Mr. Heilemann and Mr. Halperin write, felt that their boss had become increasingly megalomaniacal and narcissistic over the years, and that while the aides had sympathy for Mrs. Edwards's struggle with cancer, they regarded her as a badgering, often irrational presence on the campaign. "The nearly universal assessment among them," Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write of the Edwards aides, "was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing. What the world saw in Elizabeth: a valiant, determined, heroic everywoman. What the Edwards insiders saw: an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazywoman."

Though this book focuses on personal matters, not policy concerns, and though some of what will be its most talked about passages fall into the realm of gossip and reflect the views of chatty and, in some cases, bitter, regretful or spin-conscious aides, the volume does leave the reader with a vivid, visceral sense of the campaign and a keen understanding of the paradoxes and contingencies of history. The authors note, for instance, that had Mrs. Clinton decided to run for president in 2004, John Kerry might not have become the Democratic nominee that year and would not have had the opportunity to choose as the convention's keynote speaker a young and then largely unknown Illinois state legislator by the name of Barack Obama.

By Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, January 10, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in back-to-back meetings with Jordanian and Egyptian diplomats, sought Friday to reinvigorate the Obama administration's push for Middle East peace by laying out the negotiating framework and starting point for talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

In what amounted to a public road test of key phrases and terms arduously discussed behind the scenes with the two sides, Clinton told reporters in Washington that the United States would seek "an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles" two competing visions: "the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements."

Many of these terms are heavy with diplomatic nuance -- "subsequent developments" refers to Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories -- but they are intended to help build a diplomatic artifice that would allow stalled negotiations to begin anew. The administration pushed hard for a breakthrough in its first year but instead stirred Palestinian and Arab anger when it failed to achieve its goal of a complete settlement freeze.

The Israeli government instituted in November a 10-month moratorium on settlement building, with caveats that included no restrictions on growth in East Jerusalem, where Palestinians hope to have their capital. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has held out for a complete freeze before talks start.

Clinton, in her remarks, also tried to stake out bridging language on Jerusalem, which the Israelis think should be considered Israel's "undivided" capital. "We believe that it is possible to realize the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians for Jerusalem, and safeguard its status as a symbol of the three great religions for all people," she said at a news conference with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh.

Jordanian and Egyptian officials -- who are critical to peace talks because they represent the only Arab neighbors that have made peace with Israel -- have pressed for the talks to begin by trying to set a border between Israel and the nascent Palestinian state. Israeli and Palestinian officials have been more skeptical, with Israeli officials saying security concerns should take precedence in any discussion of borders.

"There has to be a negotiation on all of the final-status issues," which include not only borders but also Jerusalem, refugees and water rights, Clinton said. But she added that she agreed with Judeh that "resolving borders resolves settlements. Resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements. So I think we need to lift our sights. And instead of looking down at the trees, we need to look at the forest."

A senior Arab official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said that discussing the border first would allow the two sides to sidestep the question of whether Israel should first freeze all settlement growth. "We are at an impasse and what is needed right now is to bypass this impasse," he said. "You front-load borders in order to overcome this current obstacle over settlements."

The official acknowledged that diplomats had not yet found a way to convince Abbas to abandon his insistence on a full settlement freeze but added: "He has our full backing to resume negotiations."

Clinton also held talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, a key figure in reconciliation talks between Abbas's Fatah movement and the Hamas militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.

"We are coming to try to regenerate enough energy and to create enough momentum for a peace effort, and it is crucial that we would win," Aboul Gheit told reporters.

George Mitchell, the administration's special envoy for Middle East peace, will visit Paris and Brussels next week and then Israel and the Palestinian territories later this month in an effort to launch the talks. He said this week that the administration expected the talks would be completed within two years.

By Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, January 9, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Friday met the foreign ministers of Jordan and Egypt and urged a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations as soon as possible and without preconditions. U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, preparing for a new diplomatic push on the issue, says he wants to see a peace accord concluded within two years, if not sooner.

Clinton's meetings with her Jordanian and Egyptian counterparts signaled the start of a new U.S. push on the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking front that for the first-time includes a specific time-frame.

Envoy Mitchell, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and 1990's North Ireland peacemaker, leaves Washington Sunday for Europe and consultations on the Middle East including a Brussels meeting of the international Middle East Quartet - the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States.

Mitchell's interview remarks earlier this week of a two-year time-frame for a peace accord coincide with news reports that the United States hopes to secure an agreement before the end of this year on the borders of an envisaged Palestinian state - which if achieved would effectively end the long-running conflict over what constitutes Israeli settlement on Arab land.

Appearing alongside Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, Clinton said peace talks, idle for more than a year, should be re-launched as soon as possible, while providing unusually specific language on what a peace accord should entail.

"The United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments, and meet Israeli security requirements," said Clinton.

Jordanian Foreign Minister Judeh for his part said the two governments agree on the need for serious negotiations by the parties that are bound by a time-line and a clear plan, with benchmarks for ending the long conflict. He said negotiating deadlines, along resisted by Israel, would assist, not impede, the peace process.

"You cannot just have another open-ended process. Some deadlines have to be put on the table, and these deadlines help to serve the parties rather than present obstacles in the path towards peace," he cautioned. "They help put the parties in the right time frame and perspective. We've said it in the past. We've had too much process and not enough peace. What we don't need in the region right now is another open-ended process that leaves issue unresolved and leaves loose ends without being tied," he said.

Clinton said she and her Jordanian counterpart were concerned about recent activities in Jerusalem, a reference to an Israel announcement late last month that it will build 700 new housing units in the eastern part of the city, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle War and later annexed.

Judeh said east Jerusalem should be part of a future Palestinian state, but that it is among final status issues to be resolved by the parties themselves.

Clinton met later in the day with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and the country's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. The latter has worked behind the scenes to broker reconciliation between the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and the radical Hamas movement which controls Gaza.

Gheit in a photo-session with Clinton said the parties are trying to re-generate energy and momentum for renewed peace talks and that success in the effort is crucial.





Voice of America, January 8, 2010

The US relaunches peace efforts in the Middle East conflict, this time apparently focusing right away on 'final status' issues.

Washington

It's been almost a year since President Obama set Middle East peace as a top foreign-policy priority, and now the administration is marking that anniversary by relaunching its efforts.

In what could turn out to be a bold - or foolhardy - move, the administration appears to have decided to try to jump-start the stalled talks by leapfrogging over the broad range of issues normally taken up to instead focus at the outset on setting borders and tackling the issue of Jerusalem.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and George Mitchell, Mr. Obama's special Middle East envoy, kicked off the latest peace offensive Friday. They met at the State Department with the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan - the only two Arab countries having formal diplomatic relations with Israel and two nations considered crucial to moving the peace process forward.

Then next week, Mr. Mitchell will travel to Europe, where he will meet with other powers pressing for an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. He'll also lay the groundwork for a fresh round of travel to the Middle East at the end of the month.

The new push is expected to include the drafting of letters that set out areas to be addressed by a final accord. It is also expected to guarantee US support for both sides in the implementation of a peace plan.

The administration's new strategy follows a disappointing 2009 in which Obama's hopes of restarting peace talks were dashed. Now, the administration appears to be moving away from a slow-and-steady approach.

"We need to lift our sights, and instead of ... looking down at the trees, we need to look at the forest," Secretary Clinton said after her meeting with Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh. "We know what a final resolution will have to include: borders, security, Jerusalem, refugees, water," she added.

The idea to focus right out of the blocks on borders reflects the thinking that establishing borders could be a way of addressing the thorny issue of Israeli settlements.

"Resolving borders resolves settlements. Resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements," Clinton said.

Mr. Judeh added: "If you resolve the question of borders, then you automatically resolve not only settlements in Jerusalem, but you identify the nature of the ground of the two-state solution."

Whether the two principal parties in the talks will agree is another story.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has curtailed - but not stopped - settlement construction. He says he stands ready to return to the negotiating table without preconditions. But he also says that Jerusalem must be undivided and under Israeli jurisdiction.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on the other hand, insists that all settlement activity must stop before talks can resume. And on Friday his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, threw cold water on the "borders first" idea, even as Mr. Erekat expressed support for the idea of launching into final-status talks.

"You cannot have discussions on borders while the territory you want to set up your state on is being eaten up by the settlements," he said.

The difficulty of the issues in a discussion of borders leaves some Middle East analysts doubtful about the prospects for progress under the administration's new approach.

"I'm all for restarting the talks, but I don't believe you can simply go to final-status issues - that if you solve borders you solve the question of settlements or Jerusalem," says Bernard Reich, a Middle East expert at George Washington University in Washington.

Mr. Reich says he appreciates that the administration is trying to come up with a new approach to a foreign-policy priority that has not moved forward. But he also sees little that has fundamentally changed in the past six months to suggest an opening for short-term progress.

Beyond that, he says, Judeh's comments with Clinton, which included repeated references to the Arab peace initiative, suggest a tough slog ahead on the Jerusalem issue.

"The Arab initiative talks about Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, but the Israelis are not going to make any final judgment on that without everything else being resolved," he says. "If you exclude Jerusalem you might have something to start with, but I don't see any Palestinian leader agreeing to anything like that."

By Howard LaFranchi, The Christian Science Monitor, January 8, 2010

Over the past year, the United States has done much to reestablish its standing in the world. Today. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made another monumental stride forward by announcing our nation's renewed commitment to ensuring that women worldwide have access to safe and effective reproductive health care.

We agree with Secretary Clinton: The status quo is unacceptable. Some 215 million women worldwide report that they do not have the option to delay or avoid pregnancy, something which most women in wealthy countries take for granted. Every year more than half a million women -- nearly all of whom live in developing countries -- die of pregnancy-related causes. Moreover, one in three deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth could be avoided if women who wanted effective contraception had access to it.

Behind the statistics are the stories of the women our colleagues meet around the world. Recently, a single mother came to a clinic in Peru to give birth to her fifth child. She explained that it was an unplanned pregnancy and that she was mired in poverty and did not have the resources to care for the four children she had already. She meekly asked a member of the clinic staff to take her newborn baby from her and raise it. Had she been given access to contraceptives and family planning, she would not have been forced into this kind of despair.

Secretary Clinton's promise of support for women like this one would go a long way to making good on our commitment to promote the health of women and their families by ensuring that they have increased access to the family planning they need. The Secretary's pledge builds upon a commitment the United States made 15 years ago -- at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD). At this historic meeting, 179 countries, including the United States, vowed to achieve universal access to reproductive health care by 2014. We knew then what we know today: giving women and girls access to reproductive health care is vital to strengthening families, communities and societies.

Most experts believe that the global community needs to devote $6.7 billion annually to achieve the goal of universal access to reproductive health. We strongly believe that the United States should contribute its fair share, at least $1 billion annually. Providing this funding is essential to making good on the commitment we made in 1994. It will also get us closer to moving the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from goals to realities.

Investing $1 billion in family planning programs that provide education, counseling and contraceptives on a voluntary basis to women and couples would help millions of families live better lives. It would also help achieve major reductions in infant and maternal mortality, HIV infections and global poverty.

A 2009 Guttmacher Institute and United Nations Population Fund study further demonstrated this impact. Meeting the global need for family planning and reproductive health could eliminate an estimated 75 million unintended pregnancies and 20 million unsafe and illegal abortions each year. When women are able to control the number and spacing of their children, families have more resources to direct toward the children that they choose to have. Those children are consequently better fed and educated, as well as more frequently vaccinated.

Over the last 30 years, U.S. funding levels for international family planning programs have experienced peaks and valleys. However, since 2006, Congress has approved steady increases for reproductive health and family planning programs. The Fiscal Year 2010 appropriations bill, adopted last month, had broad bipartisan support and contained $648.5 million, record spending for reproductive health and family planning.

While funding levels are moving in the right direction, the United States can and must do more. Considering the value it could offer, a $1 billion investment in international reproductive health and family planning is a smart opportunity that we cannot afford to miss. We applaud Secretary Clinton for moving us closer than ever to meeting our obligation to the women of the world.

By Cecile Richards, The Huffington Post, January 8, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be in Honolulu on Tuesday to deliver a speech on Asia-Pacific relations.

In announcing her Jan. 11-19 Pacific trip, Clinton's office did not say where her speech will be held. However, while in Hawaii she plans to meet with leaders of the Pacific Command.

From Hawaii, Clinton will travel on Jan. 14 to Papua New Guinea, where she will hold bilateral meetings as well as meet with local leaders to discuss environmental protection and women's empowerment.

On Jan. 15, Clinton will travel to Auckland, where she will meet with senior New Zealand officials including Prime Minister John Key. In addition, she plans to meet with U.S. and New Zealand veterans at the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

According to her schedule, Clinton will fly to Canberra on Jan. 17 to participate in the 25th Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations to discuss global and regional security challenges. Also participating will be Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith and Australian Defense Minister John Falkner.

The visit will be Clinton's first to the region since becoming the top U.S. diplomat.

Honolulu Star Bulletin, January 7, 2010

Obama administration prepares new effort to relaunch Mideast peace talks

In a flurry of meetings in Washington and in European capitals this week and next, senior administration officials will explore new approaches to bringing the two sides together.

The new tack would include preparing letters for Israeli and Palestinian leaders that would lay out the endgame and guarantee U.S. support for a negotiated end to the conflict.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered no details Wednesday about the renewed U.S. commitment, but she and Mideast envoy George Mitchell will see Egyptian and Jordanian officials in Washington this week. Egypt and Jordan are essential to the peace push as they are Israel's only Arab neighbors to have fully recognized the Jewish state.

The discussions began in earnest Monday - the first working day of the new year - when Clinton met with the prime minister of Qatar, whose country is among numerous Arab states the U.S. is asking to support the process.

"We're going to be even more committed this year, and we're starting this new year with that level of commitment and we're going to follow through and hopefully we can see this as a positive year in this long process," Clinton told reporters after the meeting.

President Barack Obama's attempt to restart the negotiations during his first year in office began with much fanfare with the appointment of Northern Ireland peace broker and former Sen. George Mitchell. But it failed amid Israeli-Palestinian recriminations and Arab reluctance to back the process without significant concessions from Israel.

Clinton and Mitchell are scheduled to meet at the State Department on Friday with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh.

"Judeh will stress the importance of relaunching negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis under a clear and time-bound plan that addresses final status issues between the two parties, achieves a just and lasting peace and establishes an independent Palestinian state," the Jordanian Embassy in Washington said Wednesday.

Following those talks, Mitchell will travel Sunday to Paris and Brussels for meetings with his counterparts from the so-called Quartet of Mideast peacemakers - the U.S., the European Union, the United Nations and Russia - and European diplomats before a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories later in the month, U.S. officials said.

When he travels to the region, Mitchell is expected to be carrying letters of "guarantees" outlining the U.S. position.

The letters are likely to contain gestures to both sides. For the Palestinians, that would include criticism of settlements and the belief that the borders that existed before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War be the basis of a future peace deal. For the Israelis, they would acknowledge that post-1967 demographic changes on the ground must be taken into account, meaning that Israel would be able to keep some settlements.

One aim of Mitchell's European stops is to prepare for a higher-level meeting of foreign ministers from the Quartet, which France has expressed an interest in hosting. That could happen toward the end of January, around international conferences on Afghanistan and Yemen that are to be held in London on Jan. 28.

Despite French President Nicolas Sarkozy's willingness to host such a meeting this month, Obama administration officials believe it may be too soon and are looking to push it off until after Mitchell returns to the region.

U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon met with Mitchell at the world body's headquarters in New York on Tuesday and said planning for a Quartet principals meeting was under way.

"We are now discussing when would be appropriate timing for principals of Quartet to meet together," Ban told reporters at the United Nations on Wednesday. "It may not happen during this month but this is a subject of continuous consultation."

By MATTHEW LEE, The Associated Press, January 7, 2010

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that troubled countries like Yemen illustrate the need for development aid - as well as diplomacy and air strikes - to fulfill US security interests.

Washington

As it deals with the challenges presented by poor countries like Yemen, the United States aims to elevate development assistance to equal footing with the traditional foreign-policy tools of diplomacy and defense.

That is the message that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton offered in a speech Wednesday, in which the nation's top diplomat explained a vision of strengthening American development work to further such national interests as spreading American values and enhancing US national security.

"We cannot stop terrorism or defeat ideologies of violence and extremism when hundreds of millions of young people see no hope" for improving their lives, Secretary Clinton said. Not just by more development work, she added, but by doing it better, relying more on partnerships with benefiting countries, and leveraging government work with private-sector assistance, can progress be made in reducing the ranks of the world's poor.

Defense Secretary Gates agrees

Clinton's vision of a foreign policy where development "is as essential to solving global problems as diplomacy and defense" reflects Obama administration priorities. As Clinton noted in her speech, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates - a holdover from the Bush administration - is one of the administration's most forceful advocates of a robust civilian development effort to relieve some of the burdens that have gradually fallen on the Defense Department.

The speech, delivered at the Center for Global Development in Washington, came a day after the US embassy in Yemen reopened following a closure Sunday connected to Al Qaeda threats.

Clinton referred to Yemen as "an incubator of extremism" and said that even though "the odds are long" for achieving rapid progress with development assistance in such countries, "the costs of doing nothing are potentially far greater."

Clinton on Monday praised the Yemeni government's recent efforts to disrupt Al Qaeda-linked activities, but those words were met by calls from the Yemeni government for more international assistance to address the roots of extremism.

A spokesman for Yemen's ruling party said the government was up to the task of confronting extremists, but that it is up to the international community to promote "complete economic development to treat the sources of terrorism."

Transparency and efficiency essential

On the other hand, Clinton said a new focus on development must include demands for transparency and efficiency - two qualities that are likely to be hard to come by in countries like Yemen or Afghanistan, another development-stunted priority Clinton highlighted in her speech. Yemen is listed as the second-most corrupt Arab country (after Iraq) in a report last year by the monitoring group Transparency International.

Clinton cited success stories such as Ghana, Rwanda, and Tanzania, where she said smart development assistance is making a measurable impact. And she called on her own diplomats and private international development advocates to do more to explain to an American public that is hurting economically why America's international development assistance is in their interest.

Clinton's speech was mostly serious policy talk, including when she riffed on her personal commitment to promoting the role of women and girls in advancing development. But she elicited chuckles and applause when she reminded her audience of the old adage about teaching a man to fish so he can eat for the rest of his life, only to add, "If you teach a woman to fish, she'll feed the whole village."

By Howard LaFranchi, The Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 2010

The 2008 election gave the country its first African American president. But did the campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin signal further movement toward electing the first female president in the not-too-distant future?

Don't hold your breath. In fact, after a burst of electoral momentum for women in the early '90s, the movement appears to have peaked. In some places the numbers have even dropped. And for all the talk of progress in overcoming blatant sexism, gender bias is alive and well in the land.

That's the message of a new, eminently readable and thought-provoking book -- "Notes From the Cracked Ceiling," by our colleague Anne E. Kornblut, who covered both the Clinton presidential primary campaign and the Palin vice-presidential bid and now covers the White House.

The subtitle is "Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and What It Will Take for a Woman to Win." The answer, Kornblut writes, is that it will take a lot for women to overcome a minefield of often conflicting prejudices so as not to offend one group of voters or another.

For example, voters may shy away from a woman who's especially unattractive -- male superstuds such as Ross Perot didn't have that problem -- but there's also the "problem of perfection," which finds attractive Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm's campaign using black-and-white photos rather than color. If the candidate's clothing is too good or too pricey, or if she's overly credentialed, then blue-collar women may be unable to relate.

Male candidates with little kids don't have to answer, as Palin constantly did, the question of who'll take care of the kids, or constant investigations into spouses' finances. And men are hardly confronted with the constant need to answer voter questions about whether they're "tough enough" to be leader of the free world or even governor.

But an excess of toughness opens you up to charges that you are "unlikable," as critics said of Clinton. And, as the last election clearly showed, all those predictions that women will overwhelmingly vote for women simply didn't pan out.

It's not all bad news, however. Kornblut, in interviews with leading women in politics -- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, and mega-business executive and California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman -- offers pointers on what women can do to navigate to victory. For one thing, she finds that becoming a state or federal prosecutor is often a proven way to overcome the "tough enough" question.

The book is a serious survey of the electoral landscape for women, but there are many moments of fun, such as Napolitano's riposte to a question about whether a woman could hack it: "As opposed to, you know, what? Look at these yahoo guys that have been in public office for two hundred years. You think we cannot do as well as they do? I mean, give me a break."

By Al Kamen, The Washington Post, January 6, 2010

"It makes no sense," said Christopher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Yemen has been on people's radar for a long time. Pakistan gets a billion a year. The commitment of resources to Yemen doesn't match the scope of the problem."

Yemen, the ancestral homeland of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the site of the 2000 USS Cole bombong that killed 17 American sailors, has long grappled with the presence of extremists on its soil. President Obama says al-Qaeda's offshoot in Yemen was behind the failed attempt to bomb a U.S. airliner heading to Detroit on Christmas. The U.S. Embassy in the capital reopened Tuesday after having been closed for two days amid security threats.

Just as with Pakistan, Yemen's government has a spotty record pursuing al-Qaeda, sometimes cooperating with U.S. intelligence agencies and other times coming under criticism for a lax approach. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that internal unrest and a surge in al-Qaeda activity in Yemen pose a "global" threat. There are "several hundred" al Qaeda members there, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, said Sunday.

Obama recently signed a measure that more than doubles annual civilian development aid to Yemen to about $50 million, after increasing military aid last year. At issue is whether the new aid, still comparatively modest, is enough to help prevent that poor, strife-torn, loosely governed country from remaining a staging ground for Islamic extremists.

Clinton suggested that Yemen would have to earn more aid., "It's time for the international community to make it clear to Yemen that there are expectations and conditions on our continuing support," she said.

"It is about more than just the money," State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said in an interview. "It takes time to build capacity to use these resources effectively. And it takes a political commitment by Yemen to meet its challenges head on. Yemen's performance has been good at times, but not consistent."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who has pushed for more Yemen aid as chairman of the subcommittee that funds the State Department, added, "As long as Yemen wants our help in countering al-Qaeda, we should continue to make it a priority to find effective ways to support them."

Although Yemen is the poorest country in the Middle East, the United States was sending just a few million a year in development assistance before the 9/11 attacks, according to State Department budget records. In 2003, when the U.S. Agency for International Development re-opened its mission in the country after a seven-year absence, civilian aid to the country more than doubled, but remained a paltry $15 million, records show.

This year, total State Department aid will be about $63 million, including $12.5 million to buy military equipment. Yemen got $67 million in military aid from the Defense Department last year, records show. This year's amount is undetermined.

Even after the increases, aid to Yemen pales compared with the $2.8 billion the Obama administration will send to Afghanistan, where U.S. troops are at war, or even the $238 million slated for Lebanon, records show.

"The amount of aid going to Yemen is a rounding error," said Richard Fontaine, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is now at the Center for New American Security, a Washington think tank. The Yemeni government is facing a war in the north with Shiite rebels, separatist unrest in the south, and increasing poverty among the population of 24 million.

The track record of U.S. civilian aid in Yemen is not good. In 2004, USAID awarded $13.5 million in agreements to two Washington-based contractors to improve Yemen's education system. The contractors collected $2 million each in overhead, but the program "did not achieve its intended results," a 2008 audit by the agency's inspector general found.

By Ken Dilanian, USA TODAY, January 5, 2010

The U.S. secretary of State says American aid to the beleaguered Arab government depends on it moving decisively to curb terrorists and stabilize the nation.

Reporting from Washington - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Monday that Yemen is a threat to global security but warned that the Obama administration would continue accelerating U.S. aid only if the Yemeni government met U.S. demands to take steps toward stability.

Clinton signaled a growing U.S. focus on the beleaguered Arabian Peninsula nation, saying Yemen had become a launching pad for terrorist attacks on distant corners of the world. She singled out the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound jetliner, allegedly by a Nigerian man trained by Yemeni militants.

"We see global implications from the war in Yemen and the ongoing efforts by Al Qaeda in Yemen to use it as a base for terrorist attacks from beyond the region," she said during an appearance at the State Department with Qatari Prime Minister Hamad ibn Jassim Jaber al Thani.

She spoke on a day when Yemeni forces killed two suspected Al Qaeda militants northeast of the capital, Sana, in an area where the government last month struck an Al Qaeda cell believed to be plotting attacks against foreign embassies.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and British embassies in Yemen remained closed for a second day because of what Clinton called "ongoing threats" of attacks. France, Germany and Japan also closed their embassies, citing threats by Al Qaeda.

Ian Kelly, the State Department spokesman, said the decision to close the embassy had been made after officials received a "very specific threat" to U.S. interests.

Kelly said an embassy committee would be meeting daily to decide whether it was safe to reopen the facility in Sana. He acknowledged that American officials had stopped short of the most drastic step, an "ordered departure," because they believed the risk might become manageable.

Top administration officials were set to gather at the White House today for a meeting on the failed attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253. Suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, had smuggled explosives onboard.

President Obama will meet with officials from the CIA, Homeland Security Department and other agencies, partly to give his assessment of "what needs to be fixed," a senior administration official said. The meeting will be a forum for the president to deliver a "clear message," the official said, that "this is unacceptable."

As the government's review of the Christmas Day incident continues, officials are looking at the ways they identify possible threats to the air transportation system.

U.S. intelligence officials have been examining three lists of people considered potentially dangerous. One is a list of 550,000 people, all considered known or suspected terrorists. A second list with 14,000 names includes people who would be subjected to intensive screening if they arrived at an airport. Then there is the "no fly" list -- 4,000 people who are barred from boarding a plane altogether.

Since the Northwest incident, officials have moved several hundred names to "no fly" status or to the list that requires additional screening, a U.S. intelligence official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Clinton, in her remarks Monday, praised the Yemeni government's cooperation but said that the United States and its allies had "expectations and conditions" that Yemen must meet to continue the flow of foreign aid it badly needs.

The Obama administration wants officials in Sana, who face rebellions in the country's south and north, "to take steps that will lead to a more lasting period of peace and stability," she said.

"There have been numerous conflicts in Yemen and they seem to just get worse and worse with more players involved now," Clinton said. "It's time for the international community to make it clear to Yemen that there are expectations and conditions on our continuing support for the government."

The Yemeni government is eager for more U.S. military and economic aid, but its goals differ from the Americans', which focus primarily on the terrorist threat in Western areas.

Senior Yemeni officials, apparently with an eye on the domestic political fallout, last week downplayed the possibility of cooperating closely with the U.S. in fighting Islamic militants.

Amid the rising U.S. concern, analysts predict more strikes in the country by unmanned U.S. drone aircraft.

U.S. officials say they expect total aid to Yemen for development and security this year to reach $63 million, which would be a 56% increase over fiscal 2009.

By Paul Richter and Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times, January 05, 2010

WASHINGTON - In the hectic last week before she became secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton squeezed in a Bon Jovi benefit concert in New York, part of a frantic effort to pay off the debt from her presidential campaign. No sooner had she arrived at the State Department than Mrs. Clinton discovered she needed to start raising money all over again.

This time, the cash-starved beneficiary was not her own campaign but the United States, which needed $61 million to finance the construction of a national pavilion at a world's fair in Shanghai. Under federal law, no public money could be used for the project. And Mrs. Clinton, as a federal official, could no longer solicit private financial donations herself.

So she turned to her well-established network of Clinton fund-raisers, and after negotiating with the State Department's lawyers about what she could legally do herself to support the project, she mounted an ambitious fund-raising campaign that has netted close to $54 million in barely nine months.

With multimillion-dollar pledges from PepsiCo, General Electric, Chevron and other American corporations, the United States is on track to open a sleek, 60,000-square-foot pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010, which runs from May through October.

The prospect of the nation's chief diplomat asking for money worried government lawyers, according to officials. Referring to the first secretary of state, one lawyer asked, "Would Thomas Jefferson do this?" They imposed strict limits on the kinds of calls or other contacts she could make, allowing her to promote the pavilion but prohibiting any one-on-one appeals for cash.

Despite those restrictions, and a dismal economy, Mrs. Clinton is closing in on her $61 million goal. She is clearly proud of the effort, which staved off what could have been a rupture in American-Chinese relations. In a year in which she has mostly worked to prove herself a loyal member of the Obama team, the campaign also showcases her enduring political drawing power.

"The idea, for many people, of raising more than $50 million would seem really daunting," Mrs. Clinton said in an interview. "Maybe because I had participated in raising so much money in the past, I wasn't daunted by it. I knew it was going to be hard under the circumstances."

By all accounts, the effort to build a national pavilion was near death at the end of the Bush administration. The near-collapse of the global economy, the proximity of the expo to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the general ambivalence of the State Department had left U.S.A. Pavillion, the nonprofit group in charge of the project, with little support or money.

"There is a sense in the U.S. that Americans got disenchanted" with world's fairs, said Nick Winslow, a former Warner Brothers executive who is the president of U.S.A. Pavilion.

With deadlines passing, the Chinese advanced the Americans money to conduct technical work for the pavilion. They raised the issue with former President Jimmy Carter when he visited China last January.

Enter Mrs. Clinton, who made her first trip as secretary of state to Beijing in February and was eager to talk about trade, climate change and the North Korean nuclear threat. Instead, she got an earful about how bad it would be if the United States did not have a presence at the Shanghai Expo.

For the Chinese, the expo is a bookend to the Olympics. Shanghai is spending $45 billion to transform the city, even more than Beijing spent preparing for the Games. Nearly 200 countries have signed on to take part, leaving only the United States and minuscule Andorra as potential no-shows.

"I was dumbfounded that so little attention had been paid to it," Mrs. Clinton said. "Everyone knows China is going to be an enormously powerful player in the 21st century. They have an expo, which is a kind of rite of passage that countries like to do to show they have arrived. We're not there? What does that say?"

She said she did not relish the prospect of more fund-raising - "When would it ever end?" she recalled asking herself - but she promised Chinese officials that she would try to raise the money.

There was little support within the State Department. So Mrs. Clinton turned to two major fund-raisers with long ties to the Clinton family: Elizabeth F. Bagley and Jose H. Villarreal.

Mrs. Bagley, who is married to Smith Bagley, an heir to the R. J. Reynolds fortune, was ambassador to Portugal under President Bill Clinton. Mrs. Clinton appointed her to be the department's special representative for global partnerships, a job that involves rounding up private support for public projects.

Mr. Villarreal, a well-connected San Antonio lawyer, has raised money for Mrs. Clinton as well as for Mr. Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and Senator John Kerry. In July, Mrs. Clinton named him the commissioner general to the expo.

To kick off the effort, Mrs. Clinton held a conference call with 10 prominent chief executives. Chevron, PepsiCo and General Electric each pledged $5 million. Indra K. Nooyi, the chief executive of PepsiCo, made calls to other chief executives. Mrs. Bagley and Mr. Villarreal also opened their Rolodexes, calling companies with operations in China. Some obvious prospects, like banks, were off limits because they were receiving federal bailout money.

"In the beginning, we had to use a patriotism argument," said Kris M. Balderston, Mrs. Bagley's deputy. "The second wave of argument was commercial diplomacy. All of a sudden the companies understood it would be good for them."

Although Mrs. Bagley is a State Department employee, she said she was advised that she could solicit contributions. She noted that every would-be donor also had to be vetted by lawyers.

Fred Wertheimer, an advocate for stricter regulations for campaign fund-raising, said he was satisfied that the State Department had handled a difficult situation properly.

"It would have been far better if the U.S. government was able to pay for the activity involved, but that does not appear to have been the case," he said.

While Mrs. Clinton was barred from soliciting individuals, she met with corporate sponsors in Shanghai in November, when she visited the expo site.

Her experience in the political trenches made a difference, Mr. Villarreal said. "Any other diplomat would not have had the broad base of contacts," he said.

Mrs. Clinton said it was easier raising funds for this project than to pay off campaign debt. "I'm much better at raising money for other people and other causes than I am for myself anyway," she said, adding, "Even though I've obviously raised a lot of money."

By Mark Landler and David Barboza, The New York Times, January 2, 2010