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Another voice in Washington -- actually, another eight voices -- urging President Obama not to appoint an ambassador to Syria.

This time it's a group of Republican senators, who sent a letter yesterday to secretary of state Hillary Clinton that basically dubbed the nomination a concession to Bashar al-Assad. The letter asked if the Obama administration will sanction Syria for failing to meet its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations, and argued that the recent Assad-Hassan Nasrallah-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meeting should spike the nomination.

Can the U.S. stop Israel from attacking its neighbors? Sen. John Kerry thinks the Israeli government wouldn't bomb Iran without American approval.

Kerry's actual remarks are a little more caveated than the Ha'aretz headline suggests, but my interpretation is that he doesn't think Israel will attack Iran unless Obama admits diplomacy has failed and gives Netanyahu the green light.

I'm a couple of days late in posting this, but Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim had a great line about freedom of speech during a Q&A with Hillary Clinton at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha.

"I want to tell you that we have freedom of expression in Egypt. The question is freedom after expression, thats what's lacking."

Clinton has been on something of a media blitz all week: The State Department has sent reporters dozens of transcripts of interviews, including segments with Al-Arabiya and Al-Hurra. She even did an appearance on Al-Jazeera's Arabic network, which U.S. officials don't do nearly often enough.

This is a guest post from Tom Evans, a journalist at the BBC in London.

The election of Barack Obama was accompanied by great hope that the damages wrought by the Bush administration's foreign policy could be mended over. Obama's campaign team emphasized the fresh approach that would follow an Obama victory. Much has been made of the apparent failure of his efforts so far: Coming face to face with the difficult realities of American foreign policy, the Obama administration has faltered.

The Arab-Israeli peace process remains deadlocked. After the early promise of the Cairo speech, in which the president indicated that pressure would be put on the Israeli government to halt settlement construction, his administration has fallen back on the easy answer that the Arabs must do more to ease Israeli worries. Thousands of miles away, one can hear Netanyahu's relieved sigh.

Despite a new strategy in Afghanistan, there has been little progress. Yesterday, the coalition's highly-anticipated Operation Moshtarak, intended to signal U.S. General Stanley McChrystal's emphasis on hearts and minds, was almost immediately clouded by the accidental killing of 12 Afghan civilians. And Guantanamo Bay, that persistent guilty conscience of American policy, remains open, despite promises to the contrary.

The escalating war of words over Iran's nuclear program, and possible sanctions against Iran, is pretty predictable. U.S. officials say Iran has left the world no choice but to impose new sanctions; Gen. James Jones, the U.S. national security adviser, said on Sunday that current proposals are "not mild sanctions. These are very tough sanctions."

Tehran responded with a warning of sorts: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the West it will regret sanctioning Iran, and threatened a "response" against anyone "seek[ing] to create problems for Iran."

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the annual Munich Security Conference that a deal on shipping Iranian uranium out of the country to be enriched could be reached in the "not too distant future," according to the BBC.

"Under the present conditions that we have reached, I think that we are approaching a final agreement that can be accepted by all parties," he said.

American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brushed aside Mottaki's remarks, which were welcomed by China, saying: "The fact is we haven't really seen much in the way of response ... Sometimes we see a response from a part of the government that is then retracted from another part of the government."

Western diplomats are apparently pushing ahead with new sanctions on Iran, despite Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's offer to ship low-enriched uranium out of the country for several months.

US and European diplomats are pushing for an expanded travel ban on officials connected with Iran's nuclear program, and tougher restrictions on Iranian banks.

(Updated below) The U.S. Senate -- a glacially slow body when it comes to domestic legislation -- voted overwhelmingly last night to allow President Obama to impose economic sanctions on Iran's gasoline suppliers.

The House of Representatives approved similar legislation last month. The bills are different, so a conference committee will need to work out the differences before Obama can sign the bill into law. Both allow Obama to sanction companies that provide refined gasoline to Iran; the Senate bill also strengthens export controls, which would further limit the technology that can be exported to Iran.

Time for a little compare-and-contrast exercise on Yemen policy. Here's a snippet from the excellent Human Rights Watch memo published on Saturday:

Yemen's allies should not explicitly or implicitly give unqualified support for President Saleh's government, but instead demand an end to torture, arbitrary arrests, and the government's crackdown on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly. They should ensure that foreign aid does not strengthen, and is not perceived as strengthening, the repressive apparatus of the state.

And here's Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, at a press conference on Yemen yesterday.

I think it's important to underscore a few points about what is going on in our relationship with Yemen. First of all, it is very much a two-prong strategy we have. There's been a lot of attention paid to the work we're doing with the Yemeni Government to increase its ability to take care of its own security threats and to take on, in particular, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. That is vitally important.

Maybe Benjamin misspoke; maybe he meant the U.S. wants the Yemeni government to deal with AQAP by itself, out of respect for Yemeni sovereignty. But the phrasing is critically important here: When Benjamin says "its own security threats," officials in Sana'a hear "the Huthis and the southern separatists."

And if Benjamin didn't misspeak, then tis is the second high-level statement in a week encouraging the Yemeni government to use U.S. security assistance to fight its domestic insurgencies (the first came from secretary of state Hillary Clinton).

Update: Here's a link to the memo on HRW's Web site.

Original post: I'm not sure if it's available online yet, but Human Rights Watch sent us an advance copy (pdf) of a new memo, Seven Principles for Effective International Engagement in Yemen, which they're releasing ahead of next week's London conference on Yemen. We're posting it here as a PDF file.

The memo covers everything from development aid to the importance of closing Guantanamo Bay, but the most important section -- from my perspective -- deals with the human rights abuses committed by the Yemeni government in its conflicts with Huthi rebels in the north and separatists in the south.

U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton held a press conference this afternoon with Yemeni foreign minister Abu Bakr al-Qirbi. At the end of the presser, talking about security assistance to Yemen, Clinton made this slightly misleading remark.

And we agree with that. I mean, that is what we are committed to doing, working with the Yemeni Government, assisting them, providing them the support that they seek to defend their own country, to prevent outside forces, inside secessionists, other elements that are threatening the stability and the unity of the Government of Yemen. You know very well that the Houthis attacked Saudi Arabia back in November.

This is an oversimplification of the Saudi-Huthi history. It's also an unsupportable claim: Nobody really knows what happened in November; both sides claim the other fired the first shots.

There are reports this morning that George Mitchell, the Obama administration's Middle East envoy, threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Israel if the Jewish state blocks final status talks with the Palestinians. (The original source for these reports appears to be this Yedioth Ahronoth story.)

Certainly makes for a compelling headline -- but there's much less here than the headline suggests. If you read his remarks, Mitchell said only that the U.S. could, in theory, cut off aid to Israel. That's thoroughly uncontroversial! The question is whether the U.S. would cut off Israel.

If you think that's possible, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.

U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton raised a few eyebrows this afternoon when she declared, in a press conference with Qatari prime minister Hamad bin Jassim Jabr al-Thani, that instability in Yemen poses a global threat.

It certainly poses a threat to the Yemeni people; insofar as it creates the conditions that grant safe haven to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, it poses a threat to Westerners in Yemen, and (in a more limited sense) to targets in the West. But "global"? That's a bit hyperbolic.

The Yemeni military has stepped up its attacks on al-Qaeda over the last 72 hours -- a reflection of increased American pressure. And several reports say Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh approved a U.S. cruise missile strike against a suspected al-Qaeda target inside Yemen.

Yemeni troops, backed by helicopters and bombers, launched two raids on Thursday -- one in the southern province of Abyan, and the other in Arhab, a district north of the capital. Roughly 30 people were killed in the fighting, according to the government.

Witnesses in Abyan put the death toll higher: They say 50 people were killed in the attack, many of them civilians, because jets mistakenly bombed a civilian neighborhood.

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas sat down for a lengthy interview with Ha'aretz yesterday and said he's willing to negotiate a final-status peace agreement with Israel -- if the Israeli government implements a complete settlement freeze, including the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem.

But he says he's now willing to accept a secret settlement freeze, one that Israel would implement but never declare publicly.

The Times of London published a report yesterday based on a confidential Iranian document -- the full document and translation are here -- which says the regime is close to developing a neutron initiator, essentially the "trigger" in a nuclear bomb.

Am I the only one who's lost count of how many "smoking gun" reports we've seen this year? Obligatory caveats: There's no way to establish the authenticity of the document, or who leaked it, or why.

Majlis readers might recall that Turkish Ambassador Nabi Şensoy resigned last week sometime during Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's White House visit. I promised I'd follow up, and here's what we know now, a week later.

A protocol snafu appears to be the pretext behind the 65-year-old Şensoy's resignation. Today's Zaman reported on Friday that President Obama requested a one-on-one discussion with Erdogan following the two delegations' public meeting, while Erdogan asked Şensoy to relay his desire to bring in Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu and his counterpart, Secretary of State Clinton as well.

Şensoy never told the U.S. organizers of Davutoğlu's request, leading to an embarrassing moment in the White House, when Davutoğlu assumed he would stay for the private meeting and had to be asked to leave. That led to an argument, during which Şensoy offered his resignation.

The Turkish Hurriyet newspaper paints a more sympathetic portrait of Şensoy.

If you print out the transcript of George Mitchell's press conference -- only his second of the year -- it's an 8-page document. Mitchell, remarkably, manages to say almost nothing in those eight pages, which perhaps helps to explain his longevity in official Washington.

That said, two observations. First: In his opening statement, Mitchell goes to great lengths to praise the Israeli government for its unilateral declaration of a partial 10-month settlement freeze.

But you can also see him straining to avoid language like "unprecedented," the word which prompted an international furor when secretary of state Hillary Clinton used it earlier this month.

After the jump: Hillary Clinton's (rather short) statement on Israel's offer of a 10-month settlement freeze, which she said "helps move forward toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Hamid Karzai was inaugurated for a second term today under heavy security at the presidential palace in Kabul. Visiting dignitaries included Hillary Clinton and David Miliband.

Much of the media coverage of Karzai's inauguration speech has focused on his alleged timetable for withdrawing NATO forces from the country. The Times of London, for example, headlines its story Hamid Karzai: foreign troops out of Afghanistan in five years. But if you actually read the speech -- well, I'm not so sure that's what Karzai said.