And as we all know, once you’re rivals, you can’t be friends or co-workers or anything.  It’s not the Washington way.

Look, I understand the fascination here — I’ve written about it myself.  But it’s not like we haven’t obsessed over the topic for the past two weeks.  And three articles and three opinion pieces?  Sheesh.

A few years ago, I was a finalist for a job.  It turned out that two close friends were the other two finalists.  These were two friends with whom I had worked closely, and the three of us regularly had lunch together.  But once we competed for that job, which one of us got, we couldn’t be in the same room or talk to each other.

Except, of course, two weeks later, when we had lunch.  And at every lunch thereafter.  It’s a shame that we couldn’t be both rivals and friends.  Or coworkers for that matter, given that I’d be delighted to work with both again.

I guess I’ll have to break the bad news to them next time we have lunch.

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Very, very cool.  And in that spirit, here’s President-elect Obama’s message yesterday on World AIDS Day:

One other technology-related note:  last week, YouTube switched to a widescreen layout similar to that used on HD televisions.  But even though it just happened, the Obama transition already is using the widescreen.  (WordPress, on the other hand, remains stuck in old-school square-box video thinking, so you won’t get the full effect here.)

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Remember that the First World War began when a small group of Serbian nationalists committed an act of terrorism on Austrian soil (or at least Austrian-controlled soil).  But things didn’t get out of hand until Russia came in on Serbia’s side and Germany did the same in the case of Austria-Hungary.

If I were President-elect Obama, I’d get Hillary on a plane now, preferably on a joint mission with The Condi.  We can’t wait until January 20th to allow this thing to get completely out of control.  Because the current crisis is no more about terrorism than it was in 1914.

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It’s as if CNN learned everything they think they need to know from “Gone Quiet,” that horrible episode of The West Wing where Hal Holbrook, playing “the Assistant Secretary of State” for Curmudgeonly Old American Affairs, lectures President Bartlett.  Memo to CNN (and Aaron Sorkin, for that matter):  there are something like forty Assistant Secretaries of State, and none of them have anything to do with domestic constituencies.

This just demonstrates the degree to which the MSM doesn’t understand the most basic mechanics mechanisms of U.S. foreign policy.  But then again, they never had to learn any of this under Bush, did they?

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John R. Bolton, who was one of Mr. Bush’s ambassadors at the United Nations, would not discuss Ms. Rice’s selection, but said it was unwise to elevate the position to the cabinet again.

“One, it overstates the role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy,” Mr. Bolton said. “Second, you shouldn’t have two secretaries in the same department.”

Apparently Bolton has forgotten that Jeane J. Kirkpatrick held Cabinet rank in the Reagan administration.  Last I checked, nobody has ever suggested that she was a second Secretary of State, or that her role somehow overstated the “role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy.”  If they had, Kirkpatrick herself probably would have laughed them out of the room.

This demonstrates just how far removed Bolton is from the mainstream of foreign policy:  he can’t bring himself to be gracious about the appointment of the successor to the man who succeeded him.  I’m not arguing for intellectual dishonesty here, but all Bolton had to say was “I congratulate Dr. Rice and wish her the best.  That said. . .blah blah blah. . .I continue to freaking hate the UN. . .blah blah blah.”

Setting aside the obvious ax he has to grind (or is it a wrecking ball?), Bolton argument that elevating the post to Cabinet rank somehow creates a second Secretary of State reminds me of a friend of a friend who was yammering on about how she didn’t think that beauty was that important in a relationship, to which my friend, who happens to be quite attractive, smiled sweetly and said, “Jealous?”

It’s must be galling to see others get what you never had: respect.  It must be doubly galling to know that, unlike Bolton, Ambassador Rice will have the ear of her President.  Oh, and that she’ll actually get confirmed. And that even leading Republicans will vote for her.

I’d say I feel Bolton’s pain but I’d be lying.

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GIBSON: What were you most unprepared for?

BUSH: Well, I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, “Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.” In other words, I didn’t anticipate war. Presidents — one of the things about the modern presidency is that the unexpected will happen.

GIBSON: You said you were not going to be in the business of nation-building. And so much of what you had to do was nation-building.

BUSH: Well, what I said was, in the course of a debate, I said the military shouldn’t be used to build nations. In this case, it turns out the military, in my judgment, was needed to remove threats to our security, and after that removal, the military, as well as our diplomatic corps, needed to help rebuild after tyrannical situations. . . .

GIBSON: You’ve always said there’s no do-overs as President. If you had one?

BUSH: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.

You guess?  You guess?  Oh. My. God.  I don’t even know where to start.

For someone firmly convinced that history will absolve him, Bush certainly seems to have forgotten that history is particularly unforgiving when you admit that you’ve completely screwed up.

Every time I think that Bush can’t sink any lower, he finds a new way to make himself look like an idiot.  Too bad Gibson didn’t ask him to explain the Bush Doctrine.  Something tells me he would have been more in the dark than Sarah Palin.

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That extends to the reaction:  the MSM is focusing on the “team of rivals” meme, and the netroots are debating whether they should be concered that “centrists” will hold the three key positions.  I think both are missing the key story here, which I and others outlined last night in reaction to the NYT story on the Obama Administration’s plan to mount the most ambitious restructuring of U.S. national security institutions since the Truman Administration.

I’ll have more later on ten key posts, beyond the Deputy Secretaries and Deputy National Security Advisor, to watch for as the transition moves forward.

One other note:  Obama’s press conference reflects the reality that the terrorist attacks in India haven’t really percolated to the top of people’s thinking about U.S. national security.  Yes, Obama did mention it, but in the context of terrorism and not its potential impact on Indian-Pakistani relations.  Equally importantly, nobody in the press bothered to ask a follow-up question.

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[A]ll three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — were selected in large part because they have embraced a sweeping shift of resources in the national security arena.

The shift, which would come partly out of the military’s huge budget, would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states.

Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

But the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the three have all embraced “a rebalancing of America’s national security portfolio” after a huge investment in new combat capabilities during the Bush years.

Mr. Obama’s advisers said they were already bracing themselves for the charge from the right that he is investing in social work rather than counterterrorism, even though President Bush repeatedly promised such a shift, starting in a series of speeches in late 2005. But they also expect battles within the Democratic Party over questions like whether the billion dollars in aid to rebuild Afghanistan that Mr. Obama promised during the campaign should now be spent on job-creation projects at home. . . .

“This is not an experiment, but a pragmatic solution to a long-acknowledged problem,” Denis McDonough, a senior Obama foreign policy adviser, said in an interview on Sunday.

“During the campaign the then-senator invested a lot of time reaching out to retired military and also younger officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan to draw on lessons learned,” Mr. McDonough said. “There wasn’t a meeting that didn’t include a discussion of the need to strengthen and integrate the other tools of national power to succeed against unconventional threats. It is critical to a long-term successful and sustainable national security strategy in the 21st century.”

This is nothing less than a revolutionary change in how the United States thinks about and interacts with the rest of the world.  Obama’s vision, as I’ve noted before, is both pragmatic and idealistic:  he sees the United States as both a leader and a model, but also recognizes that it cannot be that without the necessary resources:

[A]n Obama administration is likely to pursue a foreign policy based on sound strategic principles and coherent tactics.  Realism should trump ideology, and principles should trump interests. Call it pragmatic idealism, if you must apply a label.

In addition, an Obama administration will repair America’s disastrously dysfunctional foreign policy apparatus:  providing the State Department with the resources it needs; streamlining foreign assistance; reestablishing a robust and proactive public diplomacy; and clarifying the overlapping roles of State, NSC, Defense, and Homeland Security.  It will emphasize both innovation and results, rewarding creativity and encouraging critical thinking.

As the Times notes, both Jones and Gates have gone out of their way to speak out for these kinds of changes.  Clinton doesn’t have a similar track record, but I would be very surprised were she not to share their views.

But make no mistake: this will not be an easy task.  The military-industrial complex and its allies in Congress will resist any attempt to redirect resources away from DOD (in fact, they’re already trying).  Reform of the rest of the national security apparatus — particularly State, USAID, and DHS — will take considerable time and nearly infinite patience.  Reestablishing some sort of public diplomacy capacity with the personnel, resources, and independence necessary to accomplish an extraordinarily difficult mission will take even longer.

This is an enormous undertaking.  To use a popular cliché, Obama is trying to turn a supertanker, and that will take time.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

One last observation:  if the NYT story is correct, Hillary’s move makes a lot more sense than it did before.  Obama is tasking her with nothing less than a total overhaul of the way the United States conducts foreign policy — the first such effort since Harry Truman tasked George Marshall and Dean Acheson to modernize American national security policy in the aftermath of the Second World War.

If she pulls it off, she’ll go down in history, along with Madison, Monroe, Seward, Marshall and Acheson, as one of the greatest Secretaries of State in American history.  And in the process, she just might lay the groundwork for a future Presidential run — and do it with a record of accomplishment that she could not have matched had she spent the next eight years in the Senate.

This is going to be fun to watch.

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I’ve never worked directly for Susan, but I’ve had the opportunity to work with her, both when I was at State (and she was Assistant Secretary for African Affairs) and since then.  She’ll make an outstanding Ambassador, helping to bring to an end whatever residual hostility remains from the Bolton era.

Two brief observations:

1.  According to the NYT, Obama will return USUN to Cabinet rank, a position it has held for most of the past thirty years.  That is a strong indication of just how seriously Obama regards the need to work multilaterally.  It’s no coincidence that the longest period that USUN was not in the Cabinet was during the Bush years.  This also means, contrary to some progressives’ (and Obama foreign policy experts’) fears, there will be a strong progressive voice at the Cabinet table.  What is not yet clear is whether Rice also will be a member of the principals committee that usually makes most foreign policy decisions.

2.  Rice faces a tremendous challenge:  working with UN states to achieve a number of important US goals while at the same time pushing the UN to continue its currently stalled efforts at reform.  Much like the USG itself, the UN is a mess.  There isn’t much that the US can do from outside to fix the problem, but Rice should not hesitate to be a vigorous advocate for change.  Her biggest obstacles will be the UN bureaucracy, which has viewed past reform efforts as challenges to their sinecures, and the developing world, which all too often has viewed the UN as a jobs program.

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Spencer Ackerman, writing last July, profiles up-and-coming women in national security, two of whom are now playing a key role in the Obama transition.

Spencer, again, suggests that Dick Holbrooke would be a perfect choice for U.S. Ambassador to Iraq. Kevin Drum counters that Obama should send him to Pakistan instead. And Patrick Barry asks why not make him a senior special envoy covering both countries as well as Afghanistan.

The BBC reports on the death of Jorn Utzon, the man responsible for designing the iconic Sydney Opera House.Steve Clemons makes the case why why Colin Powell should be Obama’s special Mideast envoy.

Helene Cooper profiles James L. Jones, who Obama most likely will name his National Security Advisor tomorrow.

Nate Silver patiently explains why progressives should stop freaking out about the people Obama picks and start focusing on the progressive policies he is most likely to implement.

Gayle Smith, David Sullivan, and Andrew Sweet outline the strategy President-elect Obama should use to get ahead of global crises.

Jeff Stein explains why the Mumbai attacks mark the end of the 9/11 era and the start of something that is likely to be even more lethal.

If your time is limited, start with Cooper, Silver, and Stein.

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