At a town hall meeting at USAID this morning, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained of a "nightmare" White House vetting process that prevented her from being able to announce the prospective USAID administrator, as she had hoped.

"The question that I think many of us have is:  When will we be getting political leadership in our agency?" an apparent USAID employee asked Clinton. "And I think we'd also like to hear from you why it's taking so long."

"Let me say, it's not for lack of trying," Clinton responded, according to the transcript. "We have worked very hard with the White House on looking for a candidate who, number one, wants the job and, number two - I mean, it's been offered.  But most significantly, the process, the clearance and vetting process, is a nightmare.  And it takes far longer than any of us would want to see.  It is frustrating beyond words.  I've pushed very hard last week when I knew I was coming here to get permission from the White House to be able to tell you that help is on the way an someone will be nominated shortly, and I was unable - you know, it just was - the message came back, 'We're not ready.'"

As previously reported, global health care pioneer Dr. Paul Farmer, a co-founder of the NGO Partners in Health, is expected to be named USAID administrator, and is currently undergoing the long vetting process, according to an administration official who spoke to The Cable last week.

After meeting with Clinton to discuss the prospective job in late May, Farmer was asked to fill out a stack of initial forms for the vet, that included listing all of the foreigners he has come into contact with in the past several years; the endeavor would take Farmer, who spends much of his time working abroad in places including Haiti, Rwanda and Peru, most of Obama's first term, a colleague relayed at the time. An official with Partners in Health told The Cable last week that as far as he knew, Farmer was a candidate for the USAID job.

As part of the White House effort to reach out to faith based and community groups and sustain support for his policies, President Barack Obama meets with representatives of American Jewish groups at the White House this afternoon. Domestic issues -- health care, SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor, and the economy -- will be on the agenda, as well as Obama's policies to the Middle East, Iran and on curbing settlements. "It will be an opportunity to make support for his Middle East policies even greater," a representative of one group invited to attend said.

Two left leaning groups, J-Street and Americans for Peace Now, have been invited to attend an Obama White House Jewish outreach powwow for the first time, another group rep attending noted. "Numerous meetings at the White House, first meeting with the President," J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami said. Among those expected to attend today's 3pm meeting:

• Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director, J Street
• Debra DeLee, president and CEO, Americans for Peace Now
• Ira Forman, CEO, National Jewish Democratic Council
• Abe Foxman, national director, Anti-Defamation League
• Marla Gilson, Washington director, Hadassah
• Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chair, Conference of Presidents
• Jason Isaacson, Washington director, AJCommittee
• Kathy Manning, incoming chair, UJC
• Nancy Ratzan, president, National Council of Jewish Women
• Lee Rosenberg, president-elect, American Israel Public Affairs Committee
• Stephen Savitsky, president, Orthodox Union
• Alan Solow, chair, Conference of Presidents
• David Victor, president, AIPAC
• Andrea Weinstein, chair, JCPA
• Rabbi Steven Wernick, executive vice-president, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
• Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president, Union for Reform Judaism

U.S. Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell is expected to head back to Israel and the region the week after next, an administration official said yesterday to continue his work on comprehensive Middle East peace talks. Also expected to go on the trip is Mitchell deputy Fred Hof, who will be reportedly trying to get Israel-Syria peace talks off the ground.

Uzi Arad, the national security advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, may be made Israel's ambassador to London, Israel's Channel 2 reported Sunday. The allegedly contemplated shuffle was described as a demotion.

An aide in Arad's office reached by The Cable Sunday said she didn't want to comment on the report, and Arad himself could not immediately be reached.

But one Israeli analyst cautioned that the report, by Channel 2's political commentator Amnon Abramowitz, may be a "trial balloon" from Netanyahu's office "designed to warn Mr. Arad to shut up."

Arad made controversial comments in interviews this past week that reportedly further exacerbated tensions between the Obama and Netanyahu governments, and angered his boss.

"Senior administration officials in Washington commented with astonishment and anxiety on the interview given by Arad in response to the statements by President Obama, who said at the start of the week that the U.S. had not given Israel a green light to attack nuclear facilities in Iran," Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday.

Arad, a former Mossad official, told Israeli daily Haaretz in an interview that he saw no Palestinian leadership with which Israel could pursue peace negotiations. "I also do not see a Palestinian leadership or a Palestinian regime, but a disorderly constellation of forces and factions," Arad reportedly said. 

Israeli reports said Netanyahu was infuriated by Arad's charge in the same interview that the previous Israeli governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert failed to stop the Iranian threat. "The leadership scattered its efforts and resources instead of concentrating them," Arad said. "It preoccupied itself with other issues, such as the disengagement and Annapolis .... it did not home in on the main issue -- Iran."

"The prime minister is not willing to discuss directly the way in which Israel governments have dealt with the Iranian threat - neither in the past nor the present," Netanyahu's bureau said in a statement reported by Haaretz.

UPDATE: An official with Israel's National Security Council, speaking on background Monday, said Arad isn't leaving his job.

Howard Wolpe, a former Michigan congressman who directs the Africa program and the project on leadership and building state capacity at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, will be named President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Great Lakes Region, sources confirmed.

Wolpe previously served as an envoy to the region from 1996 to 2001 for President Bill Clinton. More recently, he advised the Obama campaign on African issues. He declined to comment on the appointment.

As a congressman who sat on and chaired the Africa subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee for a decade, Wolpe's first chief of staff was Johnnie Carson, now the assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

As U.S. President Barack Obama and his delegation touch down in Accra, Ghana, tomorrow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will unveil a major new development initiative at a State Department "town hall" meeting.

Clinton will announce the launch of a new "Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review" to be headed up by Deputy Secretary of State Jacob "Jack" Lew and Policy Planning chief Anne-Marie Slaughter. Slaughter and Lew will brief the press on the planned QDDR later Friday afternoon.

The planned QDDR, as its acronym suggests, is modeled on the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review -- the major shaping document for U.S. defense policy currently being spearheaded by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy and a team of roughly 100 people.

The QDDR "accomplishes two goals," a State Department official told The Cable on background. It "moves our present planning from [a] year-to-year, annual appropriations-driven process. And it lashes up our two pillars, diplomacy and development," which are currently "separated by two appropriations processes and separate bureaucracies."

"It makes eminent sense!" the official added.

"The key question among development watchers is that, considering that development is broader than just assistance, any sort of consideration of coherent policy towards countries needs to take into account trade, in addition to aid," one Washington development expert said on condition of anonymity. "The question is whether ... the QDDR will be a planning tool for the State Department ... or will it really extend beyond to be a more comprehensive tool."

The development specialist said he had also heard that there may be an accompanying Presidential Study Directive on development and democracy issues, which couldn't immediately be confirmed. The National Security Council's senior director for relief, stabilization, and development issues is Gayle Smith, a former Clinton-era NSC Africa hand and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who advised the Obama campaign on development and democracy issues.

The theme of development and democracy will be a key focus of Obama's trip to Ghana, NSC officials said in advance of the trip.

The idea for requiring the administration to provide a strategy for U.S. foreign assistance was introduced in legislation in April by Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He plans to introduce legislation in the fall that would completely overhaul the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.  

Next week, Clinton is scheduled to make a related speech at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Paul Farmer of the NGO Partners in Health is a leading candidate for the USAID administrator job, an official told The Cable on condition of anonymity this week, and is undergoing the vetting process. An official with Partners in Health told The Cable Thursday that Farmer is a candidate, but did not confirm he is the leading candidate.