day6President Obama, on his sixth day in office, called for direct “direct diplomacy” with Iran:

President Barack Obama’s administration will engage in “direct diplomacy” with Iran, the newly installed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Monday.

Not since before the 1979 Iranian revolution are U.S. officials believed to have conducted wide-ranging direct diplomacy with Iranian officials. But U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice warned that Iran must meet U.N. Security Council demands to suspend uranium enrichment before any talks on its nuclear program.

“The dialogue and diplomacy must go hand in hand with a very firm message from the United States and the international community that Iran needs to meet its obligations as defined by the Security Council. And its continuing refusal to do so will only cause pressure to increase,” she told reporters during a brief question-and-answer session.

On Monday night Obama gave his first formal interview as president to Arabic news network Al Arabiya, in which he reassured the Muslim world that “Americans are not your enemy.” As HuffPost’s Sam Stein reported:

Much of the interview was spent defining the new approach that the United States would implement in that region: respectfulness over divisiveness, listening over dictating, engagement over militarism. But the president drew the line when it came to terrorist organizations.

“Their ideas are bankrupt,” he told host Hisham Melhem, when asked to respond to recent audio clips from al Qaida leadership calling him various epithets. “There’s no actions that they’ve taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.”

Obama also announced that his special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is departing on his first peace mission to help solidify a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas:

Obama spoke Monday in the Cabinet room, flanked by the newly named envoy, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As he dispatched his new envoy, Obama said he did not expect immediate success from Mitchell’s mission. But he said he hoped this early dialogue from his administration would help open the way for an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also held a presser, discussing Obama’s foreign policy announcements and further developments on the creation of a stimulus package. Gibbs also admitted that the White House email system had broken.