Top diplomat job no picnic for Clinton

Hillary Clinton may have fallen short in her quest to become America's first woman president, but she will have a unique opportunity to carve her name on global history books as secretary of state.

The feisty former first lady will face monumental challenges overseas, including the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the threat of terrorism, brought once again to the fore by the recent Mumbai attacks.

But perhaps the biggest task facing the 61-year-old, high-profile senator from New York will be restoring the country's tarnished reputation and ushering in a new era of US diplomacy promised by president-elect Barack Obama.

Clinton will also have to address foreign policy disagreements with her future boss she expressed when competing with Obama during the Democratic primary. On the campaign trail, she ridiculed Obama's pledge to meet "without preconditions" with leaders of rogue states as "irresponsible, and frankly, naive."

Obama owes his early rise to national prominence in large part to his opposition to the Iraq War, while Clinton voted for the 2003 invasion. Much of the primary fight also centered on the issue of experience, with Clinton claiming Obama was not ready to take the "3 am phone call."

She can already count on massive support overseas thanks to the image she built as first lady and the goodwill still felt around the world for her husband, former president Bill Clinton.

But following her defeat, Clinton worked hard for Obama, urging her millions of loyal supporters to back his bid and elect the country's first African-American president.

EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has said her nomination as America's top diplomat "would be very well taken" abroad.

"She is a strong personality. She is an appropriate person, capable, with experience, well known. I think it would be very well taken by the majority of people," Solana said during a recent visit to Washington.

Current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has also indicated she believed the department would be in good hands.

Refusing to be drawn into speculation of Clinton's nomination, Rice said in apparent reference to the bid: "I've heard some names of some great people, and I think that the department and the country will be in good hands."

Clinton has not yet confirmed the reports in person, but a person close told AFP: "I can confirm that she will be in Chicago tomorrow to be named Secretary of State.

Obama's formal roll-out of Clinton at a Monday press conference in Chicago nearly a month after his historic election triumph will cement a remarkable alliance following the pair's acrimonious and prolonged Democratic primary duel this year.

The likely pair has initiated many allusions to the "team of rivals" cabinet of President Abraham Lincoln, Obama's political hero.

Clinton stands "head and shoulders above every candidate" for the job, said David Rothkopf, author of a pioneering booking studying the US National Security Council.

"She has international stature ... she would be able to deal directly with the president and express herself effectively to him and to be his best strongest advocate on the international stage."

Clinton is said to have been initially reluctant to accept the post. But reports indicate that she won a guarantee of direct access to the president.

Fears that her nomination could falter because of her husband's charitable foundation and lucrative speechmaking appear to have been resolved under a deal between the former president and the Obama team.

As secretary of state, she will face high expectations from a world weary of the eight years of President George W. Bush's policies, especially as concerns the conduct of the "war on terror," and which has enthusiastically embraced Obama's promise of change.

It will also cap a remarkable political career, catapulting her out of a relatively junior position in the Senate to become the face of US diplomacy.

The challenges ahead are staggering, as Clinton herself has acknowledged.
"The next president will be the first to inherit two wars, a long-term campaign against global terrorist networks, and growing tension with Iran as it seeks to acquire nuclear weapons," Clinton wrote during her White House bid.

"The United States will face a resurgent Russia whose future orientation is uncertain and a rapidly growing China that must be integrated into the international system," she wrote in the Foreign Affairs magazine last year.

She has also stressed the need for Arab-Israeli peace, and warned of the need to address "the looming long-term threats of climate change and a new wave of global health epidemics.

"To meet these challenges, we will have to replenish American power by getting out of Iraq, rebuilding our military, and developing a much broader arsenal of tools in the fight against terrorism," she argued.
 

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has steered US forces toward the exit in Iraq in a deft two-year performance that helped pull the United States back from the brink of failure in the Middle East.

With candor and a dry, self-deprecating sense of humor, the former spymaster, who seems set to be nominated Monday to stay on his post by president-elect Barack Obama, disarmed critics in Congress even while undertaking an unpopular but ultimately successful 30,000 troop surge in Iraq.

Two years after Gates succeeded Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, the US military is pivoting toward Afghanistan, the "forgotten war" that Obama has said should be the top US priority.

Gates, 65, now seems set to have a new president to advise, his seventh in a 40-year career steeped in the Cold War struggles with the Soviet Union, with the last two almost totally focused on Iraq.

Richard Danzig, the first Obama adviser to suggest that Gates had a place in the Democratic administration, said the defense chief was "in tune" with Obama on Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

"Secretary Gates has been a good secretary of defense. I think he'd be an even better one in the Obama administration," Danzig, a former navy secretary who was also seen as a pick for defense secretary, told reporters October 2.

But Gates is not totally in synch with Obama on Iraq, having argued for a slower drawdown of US forces than the 16-month timetable Obama called for in his campaign.

"As we proceed deeper into the end game, I would urge our leaders to implement strategies that while steadily reducing our presence in Iraq also take into account the advice of our commanders," he told lawmakers recently.

Some observers believe Gates is staying to assure a smooth wartime transition, and will then bow out.

He has said he is eager to retire to his lakeside home in Washington state, and often reminded reporters that he carried a timepiece that counted down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the end of his term.

Hallmarks of Gates's tenure at the Pentagon have been pragmatism and a modest, low-key demeanor, which served to set him apart from his combative predecessor.

Gates, who came to the job from the presidency of Texas A and M University, quickly set about easing strained relations with the military brass, the Congress and allies in wake of the turbulent Rumsfeld era.

Internationally, he used wit and wry understatement to try to defuse tension.

When Russia's Vladimir Putin attacked the United States in an inflammatory speech in Munich in February, 2007, Gates returned to the same podium the following day.

"One Cold War was quite enough," he said.

On other flashpoint problems, like Iran, Gates has warned against military action except as a last resort, and pushed "soft power," arguing for more money and a greater role for diplomacy and other non-military instruments of power.

"Not every outrage, every act of aggression, every crisis can or should elicit an American military response, and we should acknowledge such," he told an audience of military officers at the National Defense University earlier this year.

"Be modest about what military force can accomplish, and what technology can accomplish," he said.

Gates has been quick to fire top generals, however.

He sacked the air force secretary and chief of staff on the same day – a bureaucratic decapitation without precedent at the Pentagon – because they had not been sufficiently responsive to a series of nuclear blunders.

When the Washington Post revealed that wounded soldiers were being treated shabbily at Walter Reed Hospital, the army's premier medical centre, the generals in charge were soon shown the door.

Marine General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Rumsfeld, was denied a second term after Gates concluded that his nomination would come under fire in the Senate.

Gates is unusual in that he rose through the analytic ranks of the CIA to the top of the spy agency in 1991, but along the way he also crossed over into the realm of policy with postings at the National Security Council.

He had powerful mentors as well, including former CIA director William Casey, a central figure in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage scandal that blew up at the end of the Reagan administration.

Gates withdrew his nomination to become CIA director in 1987 rather than face hostile confirmation hearings, only to come back four years later after a stint at President George H.W. Bush's deputy national security adviser.

An ex-National Security Council member and former assistant secretary of state, Susan Rice brings the resume of a Rhodes Scholar-turned-diplomat to the team as she becomes the US face at the United Nations.

The Washington-bred Rice – no relation to outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- served as member of the national security council during the administration of president Bill Clinton.

She worked as a top foreign policy advisor to the campaign of president-elect Barack Obama prior to her latest appointment; indeed despite far-reaching ties to the Clinton administration, she joined Team Obama when Hillary Clinton was widely seen as frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

Obama's selection of a close ally Rice to represent the United States at the world body may be a sign of how the incoming administration will prioritize strained US-UN ties.

Susan Rice, who received her doctorate from Oxford University in England, and who served as an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, has had some on-the-job experience with Al-Qaeda. She was top US diplomat for African issues during the 1998 terrorist bombings of embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.

Often described as straight-talking, arguably not unlike her mentor former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the politically well-connected Rice in1997 became one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state.

She was a Rhodes Scholar in 2000, and was honored with the NSC's Samuel Nelson Drew Memorial Award for distinguished contributions to the formation of peaceful, cooperative relationships between nations, and US security policy for global peace.

She may well come under some fire from lawmakers considering her for confirmation for her part in US policy toward Rwanda during the 1994 genocide; Bill Clinton's US administration stayed on the sidelines – an experience she has said made her more committed to action in the face of crises.

Rice has been a firm and vocal critic of President George W. Bush's handling of the situation in Darfur.