It's not quite an endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama, but it's pretty close. On Newsweek's Web site, and blogged earlier by Laura Rozen over at War And Piece, R. Nicholas Burns, formerly the State Department's No. 3 official, comes down firmly in favor of the United States talking to its enemies, including Iran.

Burns, it should be noted, has long been a close friend and ally of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and was the Bush administration's point man on Iran for most of President Bush's second term.

He writes:  Talking to our adversaries is no one's idea of fun, and it is not a sure prescription for success in every crisis. But it is crude, simplistic and wrong to charge that negotiations reflect weakness or appeasement. More often than not, they are evidence of a strong and self-confident country.

Burns does not go as far as Obama, who during the Democratic primary campaign last year told a questioner he'd be willing to meet leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez "without preconditions."

Burns continues:  I'm not saying the next president should sit down immediately with Ahmadinejad. We should initiate contact at a lower level to investigate whether it's worth putting the president's prestige on the line. We should leave the threat of military action on the table to give us greater leverage as we talk to the Iranian government.

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has ridiculed the idea of negotiating with Ahmadinejad, who has threatened to destroy Israel, over its nuclear weapons program or other issues.

Still, the former senior diplomat says the GOP attacks are misplaced:  I lived this issue for 27 years as a career diplomat, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe that's why I've been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama.

In largely refusing to deal with Iran, the United States is only isolating itself, he says:  To illustrate how far we have isolated ourselves, think about this: I served as the Bush administration's point person on Iran for three years but was never permitted to meet an Iranian.

Burns succesor, William Burns (no relation), was finally allowed to sit in on a meeting with the Iranians this past summer.

We end the week with a quick post on a recent report from the nonprofit group Human Rights First on arms sales to Sudan.

The report (a PDF file), which can be found here says that as many as 30 countries may be violating a 2004 United Nations arms embargo meant to stop arms from flowing to Sudan's Darfur region, where the Khartoum government has been accused of fueling genocide by arming militias known as the Janjaweed.

The report found that China is Khartoum's No.1 arms supplier. No surprise there, given Beijing's close ties with the government of Sudan, where it has long been helping to develop the country's disputed oil fields. But China's not alone: Belarus, Cyprus, India, Iran, Kenya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey have all sold arms to the Sudanese government, according to the report, which is based on several sources, including U.N. data, and self-reporting by the governments involved.

U.N. Security Council resolution 1556 does not ban arms sales to the Sudanese government, only to the Janjaweed. But Sudan, according to Human Rights First, has refused to honor the arms embargo, and the fear is that weapons sold to it are being either transferred to government proxies in Darfur or used by the Sudanese government in support of Janjaweed offensives.

Many other countries, including the United States, are producers of arms that have ended up in Sudan, the report states. The report, which covers the years 2004-2006, says Sudan has imported $76.3 million in weapons since 2004, excluding combat aircraft.

That's it for this week...........

National security policy, which has been somewhat dormant in the U.S. presidential campaign recently thanks to the financial meltdown, has reared its head again. And true to the tenor of the campaign in its closing days, the arguments are getting ugly.

First came Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden's remark, at a Sunday fundrasier, that a President Barack Obama would be tested by U.S. adversaries early in his tenure. "Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy," Biden said, in remarks that undoubtedly did little to endear himself with the man at the top of the ticket.

Republicans gleefully seized on the remark, and pointed to what they see as one of GOP nominee John McCain's top selling points, his foreign policy experience.

At a news conference in Richmond today, Obama said of his running mate: "Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes." He went on: "A period of transition to a new administration is always one in which we have to be vigilant .. We have to be careful, we have to be mindful that as we pass the baton in this democracy, that others don't take advantage of it. That is true whether it's myself or Senator McCain."

But compared to the next installment, that was just child's play.

This morning, the Washington Post reported that al Qaida-related Web sites were not only trumpeting the U.S. financial crisis, but that at least one poster had suggested that a McCain win would be good for the terrorist network, because the Republican would further expand U.S. military commitments, exhausting America.

The McCain-Palin campaign sensed a problem. Or an opportunity. Or both. What did they do? Schedule a conference call with reporters for this morning, naturally. On the line were former CIA DIrector James Woolsey and McCain senior foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann. (Being from McClatchy, we can't help but note that both men were major figures in the invade-Iraq crowd right after 9/11. Woolsey, as we were the first to report, went to the United Kingdom weeks after the attacks, on a trip arranged by then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, in search of evidence that Iraq has been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a theory long discredited by the FBI and CIA).

While Scheunemann lambasted the Post article, and its headline, Woolsey took a different task, suggesting that if terrorists were endorsing McCain, it was because they wanted to hurt him. "This individial (blogger) knows that the endorsement of people like him is a kiss of death, figuratively and literally, so it seems to me it's pretty clear that by making this statement ... he is clearly trying to damage John McCain, not speaking from his heart."

Scheunemann tried a different tack, reading quotes from a virtual rogue's gallery of Middle Eastern bad-guys who have said nice things about Biden and Obama. They included a spokesman for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, Ahmed Yousef; Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who merely said: "We do prefer to have relations (with the United States) whereas one of the candidates in this election would prefer that"); and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. (Last we checked, Qaddafi's country is off the State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring states, and was visited by none other than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently).

Scheunemann drew a line at declaring that the terrorists support Obama for president. "I am not going to characterize (the remarks), I will let others judge whether they amount to expression of support or opposition, whether they amount to expressions of endorsement or opposition," he said.

Asked directly whether he was saying that al Qaida would like to see Obama elected, Scheunemann demurred. "I'm not saying that at all," he said, adding that if Obama's preferrred policies in Iraq had been followed, al Qaida in Iraq (which is not the same as bin Laden's al Qaida) would be celebrating.

Here's a link to the audio of the conference call.

This is what passes for a serious national security and foreign policy debate in the campaign, these days.

OK, back to the economy and today's 514-point Dow Jones drop...

Your N&S trio hasn't posted much this week, as we've been tied up with a number of things, a lot of them related to foreign policy/national security in the closing days of the 2008 presidential campaign.

This one falls in the category of In Case You Missed It, a phrase now being condensed in the blogosphere and elsewhere to ICYMI. We thank a loyal reader for passing it along...

As noted in several places, including the ars technica blog, a catch-all funding bill that President Bush signed into law a few weeks ago permits the start up of something called the National Applications Office at the Department of Homeland Security. Why do they always give these things such anodyne names? Like National Security Agency? Or Terrorist Surveillence Program? Never mind. We know why.

In any event, the National Applications Office will use spy satellites--intended to peek into places like North Korea and Iran--to peer down on the United States. The stated purpose of the new office is to use satellite imagery and other intelligence to help in civil emergencies, respond to natural disasters, assess vulnerabilities to terrorism at U.S. ports, and the like. But the potential for civil liberties' infringement is clear, and you don't have to be paranoid to imagine some future scenario along the lines of the Will Smith movie Enemy of the State.

As ars technica notes, the law Bush signed contains some safeguards. It limits the NAO to activities "substantially similar" to those carried out under a 1976 interagency body called the Civil Applications Committee. Those are the aforementioned natural disaster/geological survey-type uses. It also calls for quarterly Inspector General classified reports on the data collected by the NAO.

That sounds reassuring. But as our colleague Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, a yet-to-be-published report by Congress' Government Accountability Office said the Department of Homeland Security can't provide solid assurances that privacy and other laws will be respected, or that data will not be improperly shared with other U.S. agencies.

Experience shows that once you start a program like this, it tends to expand, and becomes impossible to kill. So stay tuned. Or rather, look up.

P.S. - The NAO's draft charter is here.