Many Cubans are using it to challenge the government.
We should end the draconian travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans immediately and start to engage the Cuban government. This will embolden the Cuban people to demand more changes.
I’d like to see Obama go down to South Florida and give a major address on Cuba and foreign policy. He can use Cuba as an example of how the old ways of doing things don’t make sense.
I just saw this clip of Bill Clinton in 2004 on Countdown, as Keith Olbermann ridicule Hillary’s Clinton’s attempt to bring fear into the campaign.
Bill Clinton was right – go with the candidate who asks you to think and hope vs. the candidate that is trying to scare you.
He just doesn’t get it.
“And my friends, if we left, they (al-Qaida) wouldn’t be establishing a base,” McCain said Wednesday. “They’d be taking a country, and I’m not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaida.”
They’d be taking a country? Last time I checked, Iraq has a Shi’ite majority. McCain thinks the Shi’ites–the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps (and yes, the Iranians)–would allow a small group of Sunni extremists to take over? In fact, as noted above, the vast majority of indigenous Iraqi Sunnis aren’t too thrilled about the AQI presence in their country, either. (The usual caveats apply: AQI is barbaric, dastardly and intent on violating the Qu’ran by engaging in the annihilation of innocents. We can’t get rid of them fast enough.)
Joe Klein deserves credit for addressing this point, and hopefully the Obama campaign is paying attention. Bush and McCain have been justifying the continued presence in Iraq by playing the Al Qaida card, but Klein points out the obvious. They will never “take over” Iraq.
This is quite a coup for Obama:
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.”
“Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand,” Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said. “He has a sense of what is historically relevant, and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.”
Brzezinski, 79, dismissed the notion that Clinton, 59, a New York senator and the wife of former President Bill Clinton, is more seasoned than Obama, 46. “Being a former first lady doesn’t prepare you to be president. President Truman didn’t have much experience before he came to office. Neither did John Kennedy,” Brzezinski said.
Clinton’s foreign-policy approach is “very conventional,” Brzezinski said. “I don’t think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.”
“There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs,” he added. “And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America’s relationship with the world.”
The press has had a field day with Hillary’s petty criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy statements. Perhaps this endorsement will begin to change the narrative that Obama lacks experience. As the Bloomberg article notes, Brzezinski is one of the foreign policy heavyweights in the Democratic Party, and he is an excellent strategic thinker. He called out Hillary on her policies and her claims of experience. Tucker Carlson addressed this on his show today. Hopefully Brzezinski will be invited on some of these programs to discuss this further.
Newsweek’s Christpher Dickey has been one of the nest reporters covering the Iraq War from the beginning. If you read his columns, you knew that the chest-thumping and rosy scenarios coming from the Bush administration were not to be believed.
As we look for an exit strategy from this mess, Dickey explains how our withdrawel is playing around the world. The facts are grim – the terrorists will be emboldened.
Terrorists will indeed believe that all this is a triumph for their God, their vision, His design. But the United States and its friends would be repeating one of the egregious mistakes that got us into this sorry mess if we allowed the bad-guys’ opinions to dictate our strategy and tactics.
The signal error of the Bush administration was to embrace the terrorist rhetoric of war, and then to militarize a conflict that should have been handled all along as a matter for the police, the intelligence services and public diplomacy. The struggle ought to have been focused as a fight against malicious individuals, not their aberrant ideologies, against small criminal groups, not the vast civilizations they claim to represent. (A report from the James A. Baker III Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002 tried to make this point before we went into Iraq, but alas …)
Dickey again presents a powerful argument. We have to be smart about our counter-terrorism techniques.
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