Fiji’s UN Ambassador, Berenado Vunibobo. He hosted a book launch for Bolton and [co-author Brett] Shaefer at the end of October.

This raises eyebrows, shall we say, because Fiji has been under military rule since since December 2006, when Commodore Bainimarama toppled the government. Since then, Human Rights Watch reports that Bainimarama has consolidated his power and detained political opponents.  Fijian troops are even barred from participating in UN Peacekeeping missions.   And, just last week, the self-appointed Bainimarama expelled top diplomats from Australia and New Zealand who criticized his regime.

Remember this the next time someone — oh, John McCain, I’m looking to you — pretends that the Bush administration was ever genuinely interested in human rights. In fairness to Bolton, he never bought in to that flimsy pretext for flexing American military power.

But before Bowen gets to USOCO, his own organization, known as SIGIR (”Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction”), has to go out of business. To be clear, Bowen told me he’s not looking to run USOCO; I’m just using this as a cheap transition device to get to Josh Rogin’s report in Foreign Policy on the last days of SIGIR:

Bowen is currently searching for a way to keep SIGIR’s institutional knowledge and expertise in the government and to keep his staff employed. He has been shopping around town his idea for a new U.S. government agency that would manage all reconstruction efforts in areas where the military is deployed. He calls it the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations, which would exist in perpetuity and stand independent of either the State or Defense Departments, as SIGIR does now.

“It assumes that over time, contingencies will occur,” said Bowen, “It’s sort of like FEMA. FEMA is set up to address disasters, but disasters aren’t continuous. The history of the last 50 years, with 15 contingencies or so, indicates that the next 50 years will probably have more contingency operations.”

Rogin reports that Bowen met on Thursday with Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg and will soon get an audience with Anne-Marie Slaughter, State’s policy planning chief who’s in charge of a big diplomacy and development review.

Diplomatic sources tell POLITICO that among the most interesting dynamics to emerge was increasing, direct US-Iranian contact being at the centerpiece of the talks, that brought diplomatic teams and technical specialists from Washington, Paris, Moscow and Tehran to Vienna.

Obviously getting a deal is most important. But diplomacy is also a tool to gather intelligence that can be useful down the road.

The Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh 19 October 2009, during the Vienna nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna, Austria

Seated across the table in Vienna from the United States and its allies, the Iranian regime is considering an ambitious diplomatic offer to ship its uranium out of the country, a move designed to tamp down years’ worth of nuclear tensions. It isn’t clear if the Iranians will take the deal. But if the gambit ultimately succeeds, the Obama administration will have accomplished the one thing that that eluded the Bush administration, according to nuclear experts: it will have lengthened the time Iran would need to build an illicit bomb.

Diplomacy is underway to find out whether Iran will ultimately accede to an offer that the U.S. and its allies thought it accepted earlier this month: a proposal to reprocess 75 percent of its uranium stock outside Iran to a form suitable only for producing the civilian energy that Iran says it wants, and not a nuclear weapon. “If Iran ships the uranium out of the country, we’ve lengthened the fuse,” said Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshares Fund, a nonproliferation organization in Washington.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Time Magazine reported on Monday the backstory to that unexpected plan: the Obama administration came up with it months before, and secured Russian support for it in the summer during a trip Gary Samore, a White House aide, took to Moscow. For years, Russia has declined to criticize Iran harshly — giving it political credibility to remove Iran’s uranium, enrich it to a greater level, and then send it onto France for a final enrichment step. Once France takes that final step — converting the low-enriched uranium into “specialized plates that are used to produce the isotopes” for civilian nuclear power,” the magazine reported — it would return the uranium to Iran, now in a form unsuitable for producing a nuclear weapon without extreme technical expertise that Iran is not believed to possess.

At that point, Iran would be “irretrievably committed” to using the uranium for the civilian nuclear power it claims its nuclear program is designed to generate, said Ivan Oelrich, acting president of the Federation of American Scientists. “It would be a good move.”

On Oct. 1, Iran met with the so-called “P5+1″ powers — the U.S., Germany, Russia, France, Britain and China — after the disclosure of a previously unknown nuclear facility at Qom that is still under construction. At that meeting, not only did Iran agree to allow the IAEA inspections at Qom, but U.S. diplomats left the meeting with the impression that Iran had also agreed to an audacious plan to ship out 75 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for reprocessing.

But since then, Iran has denied that it has reached any such deal to ship its uranium out of the country, and in response, the P5+1 convened this week’s meeting in Vienna. Talks are still ongoing, and could last until as long as Wednesday. Early reports indicate that Iran is objecting to France’s role in the process, but it is not yet clear whether Iran will ultimately accept the deal. An anonymous diplomat quoted by The New York Times dismissed some rejectionist rhetoric from the Iranian delegation as “opening-day posturing.”

Understanding why the gambit would diminish the world’s fears over the Iranian nuclear program requires some technical explanation. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog, knows that Iran possesses approximately 1,500 kilograms of low-enriched uranium at its nuclear facility at Natanz, which enriches that uranium from natural uranium hexaflouride, which comes from a different facility at Isfahan. Both those facilities are under IAEA safeguard, explained David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security. Uranium must be enriched to over 90 percent potency for a nuclear weapon, a process involving the separation of molecular densities through an arrangement of centrifuges.

How much high-enriched uranium would be needed for a bomb? “We reckon about 1,050 kilograms,” Albright said. So to remove 75 percent of Iran’s uranium stockpile would mean Iran would “need about 750 kilograms more to get back to point of having enough for one bomb’s worth,” he continued. With some adjustment for Iran’s “current rates of [low-enriched uranium] production,” Albright estimates that removing the uranium would buy “about 9-12 months” from any time necessary for Iran to achieve a nuclear weapon if it so desired. Estimates vary, but in August, the State Department’s intelligence branch — the only intelligence agency to correctly assess before the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein did not have a nuclear weapons program — concluded that Iran could not produce enough uranium for a nuclear bomb until 2013 as thing currently stand.

If the Iranian regime ultimately accepts the international community’s plan to enrich its uranium outside Iran, it will allow the Obama administration to say that its diplomatic efforts have, for the first time, resulted in concrete steps that make it harder for the Iranians to get a nuclear weapon, buying time and cooling tensions in the post-Qom diplomatic scene. “It’s diff to make an absolute estimate,” Oelrich said. “You can do, ‘are we moving direction that make things safer or more dangerous?’ Clearly, I’d say, we’d move in the direction of ’safer.’”

But no deal is completely airtight. Iran’s uranium supply comes from an indigenous mine called Gchine, and it has purchased uranium from South Africa as well. The IAEA does not safeguard the uranium until it reaches the nuclear facilities at Esfahan and Natanz. “Uranium from Gchine could have been diverted,” Albright said, adding it was “unlikely” that any South African uranium was.

If the Iranians reject the reprocessing proposal, the United States and its allies would be in a strong position to “rush to the U.N. with a sanctions package,” Cirincione said. He considered Iranian obscurity and intransigence on the proposal to fit in with a pattern of typical behavior, rather than an outright rejection. “The Iranians are masters of this,” he said, calling their position, “You show you the horse, we’ll show you a long list of conditions for what the horse costs.”

Similarly, there are already sanctions packages in Congress that gained political momentum after the Qom revelations. Last week, Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, announced that his committee will mark up a bill giving Obama the option to place sanctions on companies that seek to import petroleum to Iran, calling it a “fourth best option” if diplomacy fails and the U.N. does not approve multilateral sanctions.

Berman said his committee will mark up the bill on Oct. 28, and aides said they did not know what effect an Iranian nuclear deal at Vienna would have on the chairman’s schedule. Cirincione said any deal might provide a “strong argument not to pass it at all.”

Additionally, Cirincione said, any agreement reached in Vienna will bolster the Obama administration against its critics that argue, as probable 2012 GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney did on Monday, that any diplomatic outreach to Iran on the nuclear weapon is doomed to failure, a position embraced by the Bush administration. “Under the Bush administration’s watch, [Iran] got closer to bomb than it had ever been,” he said. “The bluster, the threats of regime change — not only didn’t it work, it made things worse.”

This article has been updated for clarity.

Americans’ surprise at the announcement may be best explained by a quick look at Obama’s domestic policies when it comes to the international war on terror — so let’s take a glance at Glenn Greenwald’s page today at Salon. Just below his discussion of Obama’s Nobel prize is a lengthy analysis of how the president, now with the help of Congress, has repeatedly suppressed evidence of war crimes committed by the previous administration.

From trying to exempt abuse photos from the Freedom of Information Act to dismissing torture cases on “state secrets” grounds, encouraging Congress to limit civil liberties protections against broad-based FBI snooping and refusing even to investigate cases where the Defense Department appears to have tortured detainees in its custody (let alone investigating the policymakers who approved of the abuse), the Obama administration has so far amassed a disappointing record on “peace”-related activities at home.

The Nobel Committee was obviously looking at different things when it made its award, and emphasized Obama’s ability to “capture the world’s attention” and offer people hope for the future. That’s a good start, and hopeful rhetoric is important and a welcome change for the so-called “leader of the free world.” But true diplomacy and progress and “peace” can’t come from hiding the brutality of the past.

So far, just as he’s promised a new diplomacy, the President has made lots of hopeful promises about a new transparency and accountability in government. He has yet to follow up on them.

Good morning, everybody.  I want to just make a brief comment about the fact that the two young journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, are safely back with their families.  We are obviously extraordinarily relieved.  I had an opportunity to speak with the families yesterday once we knew that they were on the plane.

The reunion that we’ve all seen on television I think is a source of happiness not only for the families but for the entire country.

I want to thank President Bill Clinton — I had a chance to talk to him — for the extraordinary humanitarian effort that resulted in the release of the two journalists. I want to thank Vice President Al Gore who worked tirelessly in order to achieve a positive outcome.

I think that not only is this White House obviously extraordinarily happy, but all Americans should be grateful to both former President Clinton and Vice President Gore for their extraordinary work. And my hope is, is that the families that have been reunited can enjoy the next several days and weeks, understanding that because of the efforts of President Clinton and Gore, they are able to be with each other once again.

So we are very pleased with the outcome, and I’m hopeful that the families are going to be able to get some good time together in the next few days.

Thank you very much.

Look! He didn’t deny that the former president’s diplomacy rewarded North Korean behavior!

You know, if there is somewhere a list of things you don’t use as conversational openers with Pashtun and other conservative Muslim males, I’m pretty sure “how fetching their daughter is” would be pretty high up there.

One hopes Holbrooke left his R&B mixtapes back in the car.

Today, we commemorate the 94th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide and pay tribute to the victims and survivors. …

International observers and diplomats to the Ottoman Empire, including U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, watched a nightmare unfurl and provided detailed accounts about ‘a campaign of race extermination.’

It is long past time for the U.S. Government to formally recognize the Armenian Genocide. If we ignore history then we are destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. The genocides in Rwanda and Darfur remind us that we must do more to prevent this from ever happening again.

On this anniversary, we must remember the victims and survivors of the Armenian Genocide. We must also provide the leadership to ensure that this human tragedy is not repeated.

The topic is a sticky one on Capitol Hill, where a resolution to recognize the killings as genocide was passed by a House committee in 2007, but never brought to the floor for fear of alienating Turkey, a strategic ally in the Iraq war.

Indeed, President Obama today approached the anniversary much more carefully, calling the episode “one of the great atrocities of the 20th century,” but never uttering the word genocide. Is that an inconsistent position? Here’s The Associated Press laying out the scenario:

During his election campaign, Obama said in a speech that he had stood with the Armenian American community in calling for Turkey’s acknowledgment of the “Armenian Genocide.”

Despite bowing to diplomatic convention, Obama said in his statement issued on Friday that he had not changed his mind.

“I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed. My interest remains the achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.”

If the I-am-not-backtracking argument sounds familiar, it’s because the president has been offering essentially the same explanation over the White House silence on gun control.

“The Iranian people would welcome a hand extended to it if the hand is truly based on honesty,” said Mr. Ahmadinejad in a speech at the central city of Isfahan today. The text of his remarks was reported by Iranian news services.

“Yet, if it has an honest appearance but is dishonest by nature, the Iranian people would give the same response that it gave to George Bush,” he said. “Therefore the change should be in action, not in words.”

Baby steps.