Richard Holbrooke triggers incredible passion, lots of it negative, among foreign policy professionals. He's a Democrat, but many don't understand why he's not a Republican. Dems, some argue, are supposed to be about achieving moral goods in the world -- and to many Holbrooke seems to be someone willing to deploy any tools -- immoral or not -- to achieve his ends.

I'm going to frustrate a number of my friends -- but the veneer of amorality is why I very much like Richard Holbrooke. Successful heads of state -- inspirational and committed to international peace and progress or not -- often have strategists and global arm-twisters at their side along the lines of a Holbrooke, a Brzezinski, or a Kissinger. They are masters of gray in a world of leaders and citizens who prefer black and white. They wrestle with the highly improbable and generate possibilities. Holbrooke did this in the Dayton Accords. They are ruthless, shrewd, and morally elastic in hitting their targets.

Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has asserted that his survival in obscurity for the last decade was based upon an arrangement with Holbrooke that brought the Bosnian War to an end. Even if this turns out not to be true, such a deal would be classic Holbrooke -- and it would have been exactly what all parties needed to happen at that time. Karadzic deserves to be tried for crimes against humanity but a secret deal that led to an end to that conflict and the deaths of many more thousands was a call that a human rights purist would have had a hard time accepting. Interestingly, Holbrooke has said about Karadzik that "he would have made a good Nazi."

Obama needs someone in close proximity on his foreign policy team that the world knows is tenaciously committed to outcomes and that it fears just a bit. Obama needs to be about hope, about light -- but he needs someone who can pursue and defend American interests against thugs in the dark.

In my view, Obama needs a Holbrooke-type player on his team -- and since Holbrooke is available -- he should strongly consider making him Secretary of State.

Beneath the hype and theater of global enthusiasm for Obama, there is real doubt about America's seriousness and capacity to confront global problems. The world will want to know what America will do to achieve results.