Category Archives: 2008 President Election

OPINION: A bridge to the world; democratic renewal; world sick of Bush

The new face of America
By Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times, December 16, 2007

Consider this hypothetical scenario. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man – Barack Hussein Obama – is the new face of America. In one simple image America’s soft power has been ratcheted up exponentially. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonisation of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about America in ways no words can.

The other obvious advantage that Obama has is his record on the Iraq war. He is the only significant candidate to have opposed it from the start. Whoever is in office in January 2009 will be tasked with redeploying forces in and out of Iraq, engaging America’s estranged allies and damping down regional violence. Obama’s interlocutors in Iraq and the Middle East would know that he never had suspicious motives towards Iraq, has no interest in occupying it indefinitely, and foresaw more clearly than most Americans the baleful consequences of long-term occupation.

It is worth recalling the key passages of the speech Obama gave in Chicago on October 2, 2002, five months before the war: “I don’t oppose all wars. And I know that in this crowd today there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war … I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” [complete article]

See also, For the Democrats: Barack Obama (Boston Globe editorial).

America’s constitution produces a pure democracy Britain will never have
By Simon Jenkins, The Sunday Times, December 16, 2007

The late Arthur Schlesinger, the historian, would lecture Americans on the power of their democracy “to take the world to the brink of disaster” and at the last minute haul it back. The subject might be the Depression, wartime isolationism, McCarthyism, nuclear confrontation and now a concocted “war on terror”. Whatever it was, said Schlesinger, “the great strength of democracy is its capacity for self-correction”. America reaches the right answer only after trying all the wrong ones.

At a time when America is the acknowledged world superpower, such a rollercoaster beneath its leadership can easily be misunderstood. In its paranoid reaction to the events of 2001, America under George W Bush appeared reckless and imperialist, a bully and a “preemptive aggressor”.

It has fought indecisive and incompetent wars against weak countries that America cannot help and can only plunge into poverty and misery. To the wider world, it seems to crave enemies not friends, losing sight of Kennedy’s inaugural admonition that “civility is not a sign of weakness”.

The neoconservative denizens of Washington have been reduced to polluting their intelligence, suspending habeas corpus and debating the uses of torture. They seem unable to engage with other world powers on such matters as trade reform, international law and the future of the United Nations.

This is why America’s friends abroad have felt more despair this past five years than in the previous 50. To turn a phrase once applied to Britain by the American diplomatist Dean Acheson, America has acquired an empire but not found a role.

Yet there is to be an election. As those friends also know, there are as many Americas as there are Americans. Any visitor to that country can sense a yearning for a change, as can any reader of its polls or consumer of its media. This is represented by a sign over Phoenix, Arizona, counting down the days to the end of the Bush presidency. It is represented by the continued buoyancy of the Barack Obama campaign. America seems desperate to give itself at least the option of a black president, of the idealism of a born-again Kennedy.

That Obama’s candidature can be contemplated in a land that has twice voted for Bush and Dick Cheney is the measure of how drastically America’s constitution allows it to cleanse its politics and grasp at something new. [complete article]

The world gets the better of Bush
Lead editorial, The Independent, December 16, 2007

Last week was the week, and yesterday was the day, when the world finally showed that it was terminally fed up with the simple-minded, short-sighted and self-serving outlook of George Bush. The moment came not, as it well might have done, amid the dust and bloody debris of Iraq or the torture and state terrorism of Guantanamo Bay, but in Indonesia’s lush and lovely Island of the Gods. And, appropriately, it came over climate change – the issue on which the “toxic Texan” first showed that he was going to put his ideological instincts and oil-soaked obstinacy over the interests of the rest of the world and of future generations.

The mood had been building all week at the negotiations in Bali on a replacement to the present arrangements under the Kyoto Protocol which run out in 2012. For months the United States, and President Bush himself, had been insisting that it would not block progress. Spin-doctors were dispatched to assert, ludicrously, not only that the President was as committed as anyone to avoiding catastrophic global warming, but that the man who had spent years trying to destroy any attempt to tackle it had always really been on the side of the environmental angels. But once his hard-faced negotiators took their seats in the steamy conference centre at the Nusa Dua resort the pretence slipped away. They blocked virtually every constructive proposal put on the table, refusing any suggestion of concrete action by the US, while insisting that other countries do more and more. Ever since Bush first rejected – and set out to kill – the Kyoto Protocol, he had cited as his main objection its exclusion of big developing nations such as China and India. More recently he has indicated that the US would move if they took the first step. Sure enough, they came to Bali ready to take action on their own emissions – and still the US refused to budge.

It is simply not done in international negotiations for one country to single out another for criticism; it’s the equivalent of calling someone a liar in the House of Commons. But from early last week other delegations were publicly, unprecedentedly and explicitly blaming the US for the lack of progress. Worse, they were beginning to point the finger at President Bush himself, suggesting that things would improve once he was gone. That is the kind of humiliation reserved for such international pariahs as Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein. But even they were never subjected to the treatment that America received yesterday morning. When it tried, yet again, to sabotage agreement the representatives of the other 187 governments broke into boos and hisses. When Papua New Guinea told the US to “get out of the way”, they cheered. [complete article]

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OPINION: Obama observers find his voice

Who’s afraid of Barack Obama?
By Frank Rich, New York Times, December 2, 2007

Just 24 hours after Hillary Clinton mowed down a skeptical Katie Couric with her certitude that she would win the Democratic nomination — “It will be me!” — her husband showed exactly how she could lose it.

By telling an Iowa audience on Tuesday night that he had opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning,” Bill Clinton committed a double pratfall. Not only did he refocus attention on his wife’s most hazardous issue, Iraq, just as it was receding as the nation’s Topic A, but he also revived unhappy memories of the truth-dodging nadirs of the Clinton White House.

Whatever his caveats, Mr. Clinton did not explicitly oppose the Iraq war from the beginning. But Al Gore did unequivocally and loudly in a public speech before the beginning, as did an obscure Illinois state senator named Barack Obama. What if Mrs. Clinton had led an insurrection against the war authorization in the Senate? Might she have helped impede America’s rush into one of the greatest fiascos in our history? [complete article]

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NEWS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Islamophobia goes unchallenged

Foes use Obama’s Muslim ties to fuel rumors about him
By Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post, November 29, 2007

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama’s biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama’s stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a “Muslim plant” in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year. [complete article]

WaPo reporter responds to all the criticism of front-page Obama Muslim piece
TPM, November 29, 2007

Okay, the Washington Post reporter who wrote today’s front page article on the rumors that Obama is a Muslim has now responded to all the criticism of the piece he’s been getting from readers and elsewhere today.

A number of you have written in to us to say that you had emailed the reporter, Perry Bacon, Jr., and that you had received responses from him. So I went to Bacon, and he sent over a shortened version of the statement he’s been sending back to readers:

I thought the facts that 1. these falsehoods persist and 2. Obama make mentions of his time living in a Muslim country on the campaign trail as part of his foreign policy were both worth remarking. I think the story makes clear, including in the candidate’s own words, he is a Christian.

Anyway, that’s Bacon’s response. Enter it into the record forthwith.

Update: In a chat with readers today, WaPo reporter Lois Romano addressed the controversy over the story. She observed that Obama has denied being a Muslim, adding that “airing some of this and giving him a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight.”

Right, but the problem here is that WaPo, and not just Obama, should have “denied the accuracy” of the Obama-is-a-Muslim nonsense. The Obama Muslim smear is based on lies, not “rumors.” Bacon in his statement above calls the Obama Muslim smears “falsehoods.” But they aren’t identified as such in the piece. That’s what everyone is yelling about. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Let’s suppose that the word flying around the rightwing blogosphere was that Obama was Jewish. Would anyone be referring to that as a smear? Obama and others would point out that he’s a Christian, not a Jew, but we would not be hearing about the Obama “Jewish smears.”

In the outrage being expressed about the Obama “Muslim smear”, where is the outrage at the fact that in pluralistic, democratic America the label Muslim can be used as a smear? Apparently it goes without saying that Islamophobia is a socially acceptable current in presidential politics.

If the editor’s of the Washington Post want to salvage their newspaper’s reputation, how about reporting on the parallels between American images of Communists during the McCarthy era and the bipartisan vilification of Islam and Muslims that exists as an unchallenged bigotry in much of America today?

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OPINION: What’s America worth?

In the realm of the dying dollar
By Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, November 23, 2007

Great powers die slowly. It took years before the world realized that Great Britain was an imperial corpse, sapped of its strength by two world wars. The funeral finally occurred on Feb. 21, 1947, a freezing winter day in bomb-torn, bedraggled London, when the British wrote their own epitaph. That was the day that London cabled Washington: “His Majesty’s Government, in view of their own situation, find it impossible to grant further financial assistance to Greece,” amounting to a half billion dollars a year and a garrison of 40,000 troops. The British also announced the same day that they were withdrawing from Turkey. “The British are finished,” remarked a stunned Dean Acheson, who was soon to be Harry Truman’s secretary of State. And so they were. It was the early cold war. With the Soviet Union threatening to extend its influence over Greece and Turkey, there was no time for elegies. Instead, a quick passing of the baton took place: the United States would now fill Britain’s role and become the central, stabilizing power in the West. This was the moment of “creation” of the U.S.-led world order, Acheson later realized.

One has to wonder now whether the American superpower is also experiencing a terminal illness, with its decline marked by the dollar’s downward drift. The one difference being that there is no successor on the horizon (the Chinese have a long, long way to go), and the currency that is replacing the dollar, the euro, is backed not by an emerging superpower but by the feeble cacophony of voices that is the European Union. Yet the signs of imperial decadence are unmistakable. The world is losing confidence in the dollar, in no small part because it has lost confidence in America’s strategic judgment and in its sustainability as a great power in the face of record budget and trade deficits, which are forcing the United States to borrow ever more money from future rivals like China and Russia. [complete article]

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OPINION: Die-hard Bush supporters have a death grip on their party

Fighting words
By George Packer, The New Yorker, November 26, 2007

As the tide goes out on President Bush’s foreign policy, the mass of flotsam left behind includes a Republican Party that no longer knows how to be reasonable. Whenever its leading Presidential candidates appear before partisan audiences, they try to outdo one another in pledging loyalty oaths to the use of force, pandering to the war lobby as if they were Democrats addressing the teachers’ union. Giuliani has surrounded himself with a group of advisers—from Norman Podhoretz to the former Pentagon official Michael Rubin—who, having got Iraq spectacularly wrong, seem determined to make up for it by doing the same thing in Iran. Giuliani approaches foreign policy in the same mood of barely restrained eagerness for confrontation with which, as mayor of New York, he went after criminals. He has essentially promised to go to war with Iran in order to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, and he recently suggested that waterboarding is only torture when the wrong people are doing it, and blamed the “liberal media” for giving it a bad name. He has said that he would improve America’s miserable image around the world by threatening State Department diplomats with unnamed consequences unless they defend United States foreign policy more aggressively. “The era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end,” Giuliani snarled in the polite pages of Foreign Affairs, which had invited candidates to lay out their views. [complete article]

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OPINION: A candidate for the world

Obama in orbit
By Roger Cohen, New York Times, November 15, 2007

Little that is certain can be said about the U.S. election a year from now, but one certainty is this: about 6.3 billion people will not be voting even if they will be affected by the outcome.

That’s the approximate world population outside the United States. If nothing else, President Bush has reminded them that it’s hard to get out of the way of U.S. power. The wielding of it, as in Iraq, has whirlwind effects. The withholding of it, as on the environment, has a huge impact.

No wonder the view is increasingly heard that everyone merits a ballot on Nov. 4, 2008.

That won’t happen, of course. Even the most open-armed multilateralist is not ready for hanging chads in Chad. But the broader point of the give-us-a-vote itch must be taken: the global community is ever more linked. American exceptionalism, as practiced by Bush, has created a longing for new American engagement.

Renewal is about policy; it’s also about symbolism. Which brings us to Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic candidate with a Kenyan father, a Kansan mother, an Indonesian stepfather, a childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia and impressionable experience of the Muslim world.

If the globe can’t vote next November, it can find itself in Obama. Troubled by the violent chasm between the West and the Islamic world? Obama seems to bridge it. Disturbed by the gulf between rich and poor that globalization spurs? Obama, the African-American, gets it: the South Side of Chicago is the South Side of the world. [complete article]

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OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The options table

Will wou attack Iran?
By Ezra Klein, The American Prospect, November 8, 2007

In the last few weeks, the Democratic field has settled on an attack against the frontrunner: Doublespeak. “I believe Senator Clinton should be held to the same standard that every one of us should be held to,” says John Edwards. “Tell the truth, no more double-talk.” Indeed, the Edwards camp even asked the Clinton campaign five simple question on Iraq, questions, “that every candidate should have to answer.”

The questions the Edwards camp asks are good ones. I too would like the various Democrats to go on the record as to whether they’ll leave permanent bases in Iraq. But here’s another question every campaign should have to answer, and that none of them have: Will you attack Iran in order to prevent their construction of a nuclear weapon?

That is, after all, the defining foreign policy question of the race. Iraq is a more acute concern, but so much of the damage there has already been done, and we are so hostage to the facts on the ground, that the differences and distinctions between the candidates are, in some ways, of relatively uncertain importance. Once in office, their actions on Iraq will be governed by the realities of the war and the domestic polls.

Not so with a nuclear Iran, where the executive really will be allowed to make the decision as to whether we launch air strikes, or whether we seek a policy of deterrence, negotiation, and engagement. Yet till now, the candidates have largely been allowed to divert such questions, and all have done so in the same way. Speaking at the Herzliya Conference, John Edwards said that, “to ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table.” Asked by 60 Minutes where he would use military force to disrupt the Iranian weapon program, Barack Obama said, “I think we should keep all options on the table.” And Hillary Clinton, speaking to AIPAC, said, “We cannot, we should not, we must not, permit Iran to build or acquire nuclear weapons, and in dealing with this threat, as I have said for a very long time, no option can be taken off the table.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — It’s strange how a piece of gibberish — “no options can be taken off the table” — can so easily be elevated to the status of unassailable truth. Implicit in the assertion that options can’t be taken off the table is the idea that all possible options are cluttered there, in their abundance, all within easy reach. If this were not implied then we would perforce have to engage in as many debates about what can be put on the table as there are about what cannot be removed.

Consider then one option — on the table in as much as it is possible — that the Iranian conundrum be dealt with, with a finality that no one could dispute: a strategic nuclear strike. In as literal a sense as the expression can be used, Iran could be wiped off the map. The United States (and Israel) have the physical means to do this, but we all know it’s not going to happen because, fortunately, this is an option that is well and truly off the table. Neither Dick Cheney, nor Norman Podhoretz, nor Rudy Guiliani are going to say that incinerating 70 million Iranians is an option that must stay on the table.

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OPINION: Is Islamophobia the ticket to the White House?

Rudy and Pat: hate expectations
By Eboo Patel, Washington Post, November 11, 2007

You have to wonder how the conversation went: Did Rudy begin by convincing Pat that hating Muslims was more important than hating homosexuals? Or did he start by saying that hating Muslims should come before protecting fetuses?

One thing is crystal clear: Rudy knows Republican math. To win Republican primaries, you have to win the hearts of the Religious Right. And Rudy wasn’t going to do that with his life story (multiple marriages, multiple divorces) or his social positions (pro gay rights, pro choice). His only hope was to change the subject. And hating Muslims is a popular topic in Religious Right circles these days.

Here is what Rudy had to say about his new BFF Pat Robertson: “… he has a tremendous amount of insight into what the main issues are and how they should be dealt with.”

The main issue for Rudy is how to exploit the current fear of Muslims into a winning presidential campaign. Pat Robertson will offer his insights on that issue alongside America’s most prominent Islamophobes, including Norman Podhoretz, Peter King and Daniel Pipes. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS: Christian conservatives are not of one mind

Social conservatives fracture as Robertson endorses Giuliani
By Steven Thomma and Matt Stearns | McClatchy, November 7, 2007

Televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani’s campaign Wednesday, a surprising embrace that underscored the divisions among Christian conservatives about the field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.

By itself, Robertson’s support of the former New York mayor was an unusual partnership between a Christian conservative who once blamed the 2001 terrorist attacks on American sins such as abortion and a social liberal who supports abortion rights and gay rights.

But coming the same day that another prominent Christian conservative — Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas — endorsed Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and two days after influential conservative Paul Weyrich endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, it was a fresh sign that one of the most influential blocs of voters in the party remains splintered. [complete article]

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NEWS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: An American awakening?

Picking up after failed war on terror
By Andrew J. Bacevich, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2007

Given that Bush’s version of global war has proved such a costly flop, what ought to replace it? Answering that question requires a new set of principles to guide U.S. policy. Here are five:

* Rather than squandering American power, husband it. As Iraq has shown, U.S. military strength is finite. The nation’s economic reserves and diplomatic clout also are limited. They badly need replenishment.

* Align ends with means. Although Bush’s penchant for Wilsonian rhetoric may warm the cockles of neoconservative hearts, it raises expectations that cannot be met. Promise only the achievable.

* Let Islam be Islam. The United States possesses neither the capacity nor the wisdom required to liberate the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims, who just might entertain their own ideas about what genuine freedom entails. Islam will eventually accommodate itself to the modern world, but Muslims will have to work out the terms.

* Reinvent containment. The process of negotiating that accommodation will produce unwelcome fallout: anger, alienation, scapegoating and violence. In collaboration with its allies, the United States must insulate itself against Islamic radicalism. The imperative is not to wage global war, whether real or metaphorical, but to erect effective defenses, as the West did during the Cold War.

* Exemplify the ideals we profess. Rather than telling others how to live, Americans should devote themselves to repairing their own institutions. Our enfeebled democracy just might offer the place to start.

The essence of these principles can be expressed in a single word: realism, which implies seeing ourselves as we really are and the world as it actually is. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — “Seeing ourselves as we really are and the world as it actually is” — yes indeed, wouldn’t that be a welcome change? But it would also amount to a profound transformation in the American psyche.

Few people in the world have a realistic self-image — what distinguishes Americans is that their lack of self-understanding has such a destructive impact on others.

As occupants of a continent with vast oceans to either side, there is a geographic realism to America’s sense of isolation. The gulf that now needs to be crossed is psychological — it requires that Americans acquire the conviction that the world matters. Yet the world as “other” — as somewhere else — is something from which we have set ourselves apart. Having distasterously ventured into this other, discovered that we are often unwelcome and even reviled, the natural response is to retreat.

The pompous advocates of engagement assert that the world needs American leadership. The message that Americans and the world really need to hear is the reverse: America needs the world. We cannot afford to isolate ourselves. We cannot afford to remain ignorant. The world that seems other is simply a world in which we have yet to understand our place. It is a world in which we should neither assert preeminence nor project our fear.

Next president urged to fix global image
By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, November 7, 2007

The next US president must expand American involvement in the United Nations and other international bodies and dramatically increase foreign aid – especially among Muslim countries – to reverse the steep decline in American influence and enhance national security, a bipartisan group of politicians, business executives, and academics said in a report yesterday.
more stories like this

The report, titled “A Smarter and Safer America,” also condemned what it called the American “exporting of fear” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and criticized the use of “hard power,” military might, as the main component of US foreign policy instead of the “soft power” of positive US influences.

But the authors – including Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under President Bush, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye Jr. – said their recommendations, issued one year ahead of Election Day, is a foreign policy blueprint for Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls. [complete article]

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FEATURE: What’s good for others is good for us

Is (his) biography (our) destiny?
By James Traub, New York Times, November 4, 2007

The United States has had only one foreign policy and one national-security strategy since the transforming events of 9/11 — and this set of doctrines has been shaped by the very distinctive worldview of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the men and women around them. The great project of the foreign-policy world in the last few years has been to think through a “post-post-9/11 strategy,” in the words of the Princeton Project on National Security, a study that brought together many of the foreign-policy thinkers of both parties. Such a strategy, the experts concluded, must, like “a Swiss Army knife,” offer different tools for different situations, rather than only the sharp edge of a blade; must pay close attention to “how others may perceive us differently than we perceive ourselves, no matter how good our intentions”; must recognize that other nations may legitimately care more about their neighbors or their access to resources than about terrorism; and must be “grounded in hope, not fear.” A post-post-9/11 strategy must harness the forces of globalization while honestly addressing the growing “perception of unfairness” around the world; must actively promote, not just democracy, but “a world of liberty under law”; and must renew multilateral instruments like the United Nations.

In mainstream foreign-policy circles, Barack Obama is seen as the true bearer of this vision. “There are maybe 200 people on the Democratic side who think about foreign policy for a living,” as one such figure, himself unaffiliated with a campaign, estimates. “The vast majority have thrown in their lot with Obama.” Hillary Clinton’s inner circle consists of the senior-most figures from her husband’s second term in office — the former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the former national security adviser Sandy Berger and the former United Nations ambassador Richard Holbrooke. But drill down into one of Washington’s foreign-policy hives, whether the Carnegie Endowment or the Brookings Institution or Georgetown University, and you’re bound to hit Obama supporters. Most of them served in the Clinton administration, too, and thus might be expected to support Hillary Clinton. But many of these younger and generally more liberal figures have decamped to Obama. And they are ardent. As Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council official under President Clinton who now heads up a team advising Obama on nonproliferation issues, puts it, “There’s a feeling that this is a guy who’s going to help us transform the way America deals with the world.” Ex-Clintonites in Obama’s inner circle also include the president’s former lawyer, Greg Craig, and Richard Danzig, his Navy secretary. [complete article]

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NEWS: Romney: “A world without America as the leader is a very frightening place”

Mitt Romney: I won’t let U.S. go the way of U.K.
By Toby Harnde, The Telegraph, October 31, 2007

The United States is in danger of becoming a “second-tier” nation like Britain and other European countries if Hillary Clinton wins the White House, according to Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential contender.

Although he gave a Hallowe’en warning of a “house of horrors” if Mrs Clinton is elected, the main bogeyman for the former Massachusetts governor’s stump has become Europe, with Britain’s national health service being singled out for special mention.

Speaking, ironically, to employees of BAE Systems Inc, the US subsidiary of the British defence company, in the elegant New England town of Nashua on Monday, Mr Romney said that America was at a crossroads in history.

“The question is whether we’re going to become a stronger nation leading the world or whether we’re going to follow the path of Europe and become a second-tier military and a second-tier nation.” European countries had chosen to “become a wonderful nation but not the world’s power”.

America’s health system should remain privately rather than government run, he insisted. “I do not want to go the way of England and Canada when it comes to healthcare,” he said.

He added: “For me what America should do is strengthen our military, strengthen our economy and strengthen our family structure so that we always remain the most powerful nation on earth. A world without America as the leader is a very frightening place.” [complete article]

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NEWS: Brzezinski embraces Obama over Clinton for president

Brzezinski embraces Obama over Clinton for president
By Janine Zacharia, Bloomberg, August 24, 2007

Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the most influential foreign-policy experts in the Democratic Party, threw his support behind Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, saying the Illinois senator has a better global grasp than his chief rival, Hillary Clinton.

Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world,” Brzezinski said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt.” [complete article]

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