Two different White Houses, two different speeches. In June 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood before an audience of 600 at the American University in Cairo, assailed the Egyptian government for intimidating and locking up protesters and called for President Hosni Mubarak to hold free elections.

Haji Yusof bin Idris lives opposite the riverfront in Phnom Penh, on the peninsula that divides the Mekong River from the Tonle Sap. He’s the unassuming imam of the modest Alazhar Mosque, which boasts about 2,600 followers. He’s also a pivotal player in the West’s counter-terrorism effort in Southeast Asia.

Co-chaired by Ambassador James Glassman and Secretary Dan Glickman, the Strategic Public Diplomacy Project seeks to develop recommendations on ways to tightly integrate public diplomacy with foreign policy to advance U.S. strategic interests in a new media age.

From the outset of the Obama presidency and the emergence of the Obama Doctrine, the similarities between this Administration and that of Jimmy Carter have been striking. Like Obama, Carter trumpeted soft power and international institutions as the means to solve the most perplexing foreign policy problems.

Not much was needed; just some phrasing such as, “President Mubarak has served his country well, and ensuring peaceful transition to new leadership would continue that service.”

The Peace Corps has endured a rough month. On Jan. 18, the Corps lost Sargent Shriver, its charismatic architect and first leader. The previous Friday, ABC News ran a grizzly story on violence against Peace Corps volunteers.

Not much was needed; just some phrasing such as, “President Mubarak has served his country well, and ensuring peaceful transition to new leadership would continue that service.”

If President Obama had said something like that, Hosni Mubarak would have been furious and probably ignored the advice, but Egyptians and others throughout the Arab world and beyond would have seen that for once the United States was not defending a dictator, but rather was standing on the side of democracy.

Egyptian opposition groups for years had targeted 2011 as the year they'd move to oust President Hosni Mubarak -- and US officials, although supportive, were "doubtful" of the unwritten plan's existence, a secret diplomatic cable shows.