AP: Obama advisor suggests Robert Gates as possible holdover. Which seems to make a lot of sense.

Gates also gave these interesting, unstarry eyed remarks about the challenge of engaging Iran at a Nat'l Defense University speech Monday (below the fold)

SEC. GATES: I have been involved in the search for the elusive Iranian moderate for 30 years. (Laughter.) I was in the first meeting that took place between a senior U.S. government official and the leadership of the Iranian government in Algiers at the end of October, 1979. Brzezinski -- the Iranian prime minister, defense minister and foreign minister asked to meet with Brzezinski, who was in Algiers for the 25th anniversary of the Algerian Revolution and I was with him. He asked me to go as the note-taker.

And he walked into that meeting and, in essence, said, "We will accept
your revolution. We will recognize your country. We will recognize
your government. We will sell you all the weapons that we had
contracted to sell the Shah. We have a common enemy to your north.
We can work together in the future." Their response was, "Give us the
Shah." Each repeated their respective positions about five or six
times and at the end, Brzezinski stood up and said, "To give you the
Shah would be incompatible with our national honor." And that ended
it. And three days later they seized our embassy and two weeks later
all three of those officials were out of their jobs.

Every administration since then has reached out to the Iranians in one
way or another and all have failed. Some have gotten into deep
trouble associated with their failures, but the reality is the Iranian
leadership has been consistently unyielding over a very long period of
time in response to repeated overtures from the United States about
having a different and better kind of relationship. And it seems to
me that the effort that we are now engaged in with our allies, with
Russia and China, in terms of trying to bring pressure to bear on the
Iranians to change their approach to the rest of the world is probably
the best way to go about this.

We've been engaged in talks with the Iranians. This administration,
in 2004, as I recall, reached out to the Iranians and there were some
discussions at that time because there was some ambiguity about
whether the Iranians were being helpful or not in Iraq. There were
some instances where they were being helpful, some where they weren't.

And of course, in the 2004 or (200)5 study that I co-chaired with
Brzezinski for the Council on Foreign Relations with respect to U.S.
policy on Iran, given the fact that President Khatami was in power,
sounded more moderate -- at least was not making some of the
outrageous statements that Ahmadinejad does -- we said, "It's worth
reaching out to them."

But with the election of Ahmadinejad and the things he has said and
the things that Iran continues to do, it seems to me that the contacts
that we've had at the ambassadorial level -- the opportunity to engage
in a dialogue should they be willing to stop their enrichment in some
kind of verifiable way is not an unreasonable precondition to
high-level talks.

I just think this is a case where we have to look at the history of
outreach that was very real, under successive presidents, and did not
yield any results. I think until the Iranians decide they want to
take a different approach, to the rest of the world, that where we are
is probably not a bad place.

....

Posted by Laura at October 2, 2008 11:16 AM