Say what you want about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but “he knows how to work a room.” So claims Flynt Leverett, the contrarian Iran analyst who, with his wife Hillary Mann Leverett, paid a visit to the Iranian president in New York City last fall. During the sit-down at Manhattan’s InterContinental Barclay hotel with a group of invited academics, foreign policy professionals, and other Iranophiles, the Leveretts marveled at Ahmadinejad’s attention to detail as the Iranian took copious notes and strove to pronounce their unfamiliar names correctly.

After ten months of waiting, USAID finally has a new chief: Rajiv Shah, currently the agriculture department’s top scientist. Directing the country’s principal agency for administering foreign aid is a heady position for someone who is all of 36. And it’s going to be a difficult one. Shah is stepping into the middle of a struggle that has been quietly simmering for years in Washington.

Reading through Bob Woodward's The War Within, one thing that jumps out is the devastating portrait of National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, who's often considered something of a dud and enabler in his position, on the model of first-term (2001-2005) Condoleezza Rice. Here he is on pages 8 and 27-28:

Hadley believed he had developed as close a relationship with his president as any national security advisor in history. He was ever present. ... Hadley said of their relationship, "If I feel it, he feels it. If he feels it, I feel it."

The future of Russia's excursion in Georgia remains to be determined. But some conclusions can already be drawn:

CONFRONTING IRAN:
THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE NEXT GREAT CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST By Ali M.

"Who's that gray-haired guy in there with the monkeys and the Kennedy?"

Now celebrating her twentieth year as the host of the world's most influential talk show, Oprah Winfrey is to television what Bach is to music, Giotto to painting, Joyce to literature. Time magazine hit the nail on the head when it recently voted her one of the world's handful of "leaders and revolutionaries." (Condoleezza Rice wrote Oprah's citation: "She has struggled with many of the challenges that we all face, and she has transformed her life.

Two weeks ago, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to refer the matter of Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council. There is plenty to like about the IAEA resolution, starting with the large majority it commanded among the organization's member states--even the usually recalcitrant Russians and Chinese signed on.

In late July, news surfaced that Iran had executed two gay teenagers--ostensibly for sexual assault, but most likely for the crime of being gay. As pictures of their executions spread around the Internet, American gay and lesbian activists responded swiftly: The president of the Human Rights Campaign, the country's largest gay and lesbian political organization, sent a letter to Condoleezza Rice urging her to take action; the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the gay and lesbian division of Human Rights Watch both issued statements on their websites; news outlets like The Washington Blade and Gay City News uncharacteristically led their coverage with an international story; and gay journalists like Doug Ireland and TNR senior editor Andrew Sullivan--who sit on opposite ends of the political spectrum--publicized the news on their blogs.

It took a few days after New Orleans flooded for the press to breach the mental levee blocking comments on the victims' race and class. But, once that levee finally broke, it washed away pretty quickly. In a furious rant on Thursday, CNN's Jack Cafferty lashed out at journalists' unwillingness to take on the "elephant in the room" and complained that "almost every person we've seen, from the families stranded on their rooftops ... to the people holed up in the Superdome, are black and poor." Thereafter, the major networks got in on the action, and, by Sunday, a Fox roundtable was debating Condoleezza Rice's concession that "we do, I think, at some point, need to see that people couldn't evacuate who were poor ... [and] understand better how to make sure that that doesn't happen again."

The splotch that appeared on satellite photos of North Korea two weeks ago was like a Rorschach blot for foreign policy wonks. A cloud of smoke that would have been considered benign in almost any other country (it being in actuality just a cloud) was immediately feared the result of a nuclear explosion, showing just how anxious national security types have become about Pyongyang's weapons program. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice had to reassure the Sunday morning talk shows that the North had not, in fact, tested a nuclear bomb.

In early 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney spoke to President George W. Bush from the heart. The war in Afghanistan had been an astonishing display of U.S. strength. Instead of the bloody quagmire many predicted, CIA paramilitary agents, Special Forces, and U.S. air power had teamed with Northern Alliance guerrillas to run the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of their strongholds. As a new interim government took power in Kabul, Cheney was telling Bush that the next phase in the war on terrorism was toppling Saddam Hussein.

On May 28, George Tenet delivered for the Bush administration. Nearly two months had passed since the fall of Baghdad. U.S. forces had turned up no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, raising the specter of gross misjudgment on the part of the U.S. intelligence community and allegations of presidential dishonesty. But, that day, the CIA announced that two trailers found in northern Iraq the previous month were actually mobile biological-agent production facilities.

Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ...