Sam Husseini asked a tough question of a member of the Saudi royal family at a National Press Club event--which got him into some trouble with folks at the Press Club. (Good news--his suspension has been lifted.)

Part of what motivated Husseini to question Turki al-Faisal was the fact that a representative of such a repressive regime would have the nerve to give a talk about Arab democracy. Elite journalists, on the other hand, don't spend much time worrying about this. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius filed his Sunday column (11/27/11) from Riyadh, where he was speaking about, what else, Arab democracy with another member of the Saudi ruling family, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.

Ignatius' point was that "elders who have been through countless springs and winters" can see things with "consequent clarity." He went on:

There are some wise, older voices left, and they deserve a hearing. So listen for a moment to Prince Saud al-Faisal, the 71-year-old Saudi foreign minister. He's had that post since 1975 and is the world’s longest-serving foreign minister.

I met Saud at his palace here a week ago, and it was a poignant visit: The prince has Parkinson's disease, and his hands and voice tremble slightly. Though his body is frail, his Princeton-educated intellect remains sharp: This was the most interesting of our many conversations over the years.

What was so interesting about Saud's words? It's not clear.  He says that Arab "governing bodies" assume "that they can go on neglecting the will of the people," which he apparently thinks is unwise--though he also seems to think that Saudi Arabia's family-based dictatorship is not doing this.

Husseini asked about the Saudi regime's efforts to inhibit pro-democracy Arab Spring movements in Egypt and Bahrain. Ignatius, on other hand, dwelled on the positive:

I think Saud captured the most positive factor I have seen in my travels this year. The Arab people are writing their own narrative for once. They are not victims of domestic dictators or foreign powers.

Ignatius also reports back that "Saud has the regal ways of a Bedouin prince, tall and thin, with an ascetic face that masks the spark in his eyes." Now that's journalism!

David Ignatius of the Washington Post (12/29/10):

I've seen Petraeus give many briefings over the years, and it's a bit like watching a magician at work. Even though you've seen the trick before, and you know the patter, you still get mesmerized. He has the ability to make people believe the impossible might be doable, after all.

That sounds bad, but then I remembered this from ABC's Martha Raddatz (6/23/10):

A warrior and a scholar, Petraeus is sometimes jokingly referred to as a water walker, since almost everything he touches seems to turn to gold.

Joke's on us, I guess.

Yesterday (11/22/10) Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post wrote a column headlined "Obama's foreign policy needs an update," where he worried that the White House suffers from a "lack of grand strategy - or strategists. Its top foreign-policy makers are a former senator, a Washington lawyer and a former Senate staffer. There is no Henry Kissinger, no Zbigniew Brzezinski, no Condoleezza Rice; no foreign policy scholar."

The irony inherit in complaining that Obama's foreign policy is too old-fashioned and in need of some of the old Kissinger magic should be obvious enough. Less clear is why anyone would single out Condoleezza Rice like this; was the Bush administration's foreign policy uniquely strategic?

But the calls for Obama to get himself a Kissinger seem to be a regular feature of the Post's op-ed page.

--David Ignatius (7/8/10):

The two modern American masters of Machiavellian diplomacy, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, both practiced their art at times comparable to this one -- with the country suffering from reversals in war and loss of confidence in its political leadership.

So it's an interesting thought exercise to imagine how a national security adviser with the secretive, back-channel style of a Kissinger or Brzezinski would play America's diplomatic hand now. Mind you, I'm not suggesting what policies these two would actually recommend today but, instead, what a more creative diplomatic approach might produce in a time of difficulty.

When I say "creative," what I partly mean is devious. Both Kissinger and Brzezinski did not always state publicly what they were doing in private.

Ignatius did acknowledge that "Not all of Kissinger's machinations were successful." Well that's one way to put it. He added:

But if ever there were a moment when a battle-fatigued United States needs a wily strategist to explore options, this is it. Just who could play this role among the administration's current cast of characters isn't obvious, and that's a problem President Obama should address.

And then here's David Ignatius again, a mere nine months earlier (10/8/09):

I have been looking for a "doctrine" because, frankly, strategic thinking has been this administration's weak spot. A pragmatic president has surrounded himself with pragmatic advisers -- a retired Marine general as national security adviser, a former senator as secretary of state, a career intelligence officer as secretary of defense. None are grand strategists on the model of Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski.

A meeting of the minds between NBC host Chris Matthews and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (Chris Matthews Show, 11/29/09):

IGNATIUS: The long period of analysis, very deliberative, robs this of passion. This is--he was going to be a wartime president now, and he has to sell the country on the idea that our young men and women are going to go there, fight and get killed.

MITCHELL: Yes.

IGNATIUS: And, you know, I think this, you know, this is not going to....

MATTHEWS: So too much Chamberlain, not enough Churchill.

IGNATIUS: Well, too much--too much college professor.

David Ignatius starts off his Washington Post column today ("A New Deal for the CIA," 9/17/09) with a story about Jeannie de Clarens, a 90-year-old Frenchwoman who infiltrated the Nazi army, discovered information about German rockets that "saved London," was captured by the Gestapo and survived a year in a concentration camp without betraying her secrets.

De Clarens sounds like a real hero with a great story. But the moral Ignatius draws from it is not so great: "When we read about waterboarding and other techniques that shock the conscience, it's easy to lose sight of what intelligence agents like my friend Jeannie do most of the time--and their importance in protecting the country."

Somehow I suspect, contrary to Ignatius, that CIA employees in recent years have been more likely to be engaged in waterboarding and other forms of torture than to have performed death-defying, world-saving undercover work like de Clarens.  In any case, we admire someone like her because she stood up to a ruthless force that used torture routinely; to suggest that her example should make us pay less attention to torturers working for our own government is rather perverse.

Ignatius goes on to endorse the proposal of David Omand, former coordinator of British intelligence, for a "paradigm shift"--replacing the old system "in which  intelligence agencies could do pretty much as they liked" with a new system where "the public gives the intelligence agencies certain powers needed to keep the country safe." Well, the latter certainly sounds preferable to the former--but as far as the public is concerned, we've always been living under the second system, passing laws through our elected representatives that limited the powers of intelligence agencies. If the agencies decided to act as though they lived under the other system, that's called "breaking the law."

But for Ignatius, expecting that intelligence agencies will follow the law is a new, rather radical idea, and it will require concessions on the part of the citizenry:

In this new "grand bargain," Omand stressed, the public must understand that if it decides--for moral and political reasons--to limit certain activities (as in interrogation or surveillance techniques), it also accepts the risk that there will be "normal accidents."

Ignatius really ought to understand that the U.S. public made that decision a long time ago--back in 1791, when it ratified the Bill of Rights.