After being overshadowed by another spunky statehouse figure, Alaska's Governor finally gets some attention this weekend as Colin Powell emerges on CNN with a little lecture for her on American values.
"Gov. Palin," Powell tells Fareed Zakaria, "pushed the party more to the right, and...had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about how small town values are good. Well, most of us don’t live in small towns. And I was raised in the South Bronx, and there’s nothing wrong with my value system from the South Bronx."
I admit bias here. Colin Powell started life in Harlem and the Bronx of poor immigrant parents, as I did, and was given an education at the City College of New York, as I was, by the American people. He spent his life serving them with honor and valor until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney trashed his reputation by putting him out front at the UN with doctored intelligence about Iraq.
Having taxpayers give you what your parents could never afford gave generations of us values of community and responsibility that led many to try to do more than make money and reputations.
Colin Powell, with his endorsement of Obama and now his attempt to push the Republican Party back to its roots and ahead to its future of talking to all minorities, including hockey moms, is still trying to serve his country.
Showing posts with label Fareed Zakaria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fareed Zakaria. Show all posts
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Obama Beyond the Sound Bites
After eight years of Bush-Cheney bluster and the promise of a regular-guy version from John McCain, the prospect of a president with more than a sound-bite view of American foreign policy was raised today in Fareed Zarakia's extended CNN interview with Barack Obama.
The Democratic candidate proposed to "bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan but also characterized to a large degree the first President Bush with people like Scowcroft and Powell and Baker...a fairly clear-eyed view of how the world works, and recognized that it is always in our interests to engage, to listen, to build alliances--to understand what our interests are, and to be fierce in protecting those interests, but to make sure that we understand it's very difficult for us to, as powerful as we are, to deal with all these issues by ourselves.
"We need to show leadership...through pulling people together wherever we can. There are going to be times where we have to act unilaterally to protect our interests. And I always reserve the right to do that, should I be commander in chief."
On the overriding issue of Islamic extremism, Obama said he would "hunt down those who would resort to violence to move their agenda, their ideology forward. We should be going after al Qaeda and those networks fiercely and effectively.
"But what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.
"And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors...result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues."
The Republican spin machine will doubtlessly characterize that nuanced attitude toward American power in a complex and dangerous world as naïveté, weakness and vacillation. If voters believe that, we could be in for four more years of disastrous Neo-Con certainty, mock macho and isolation from the rest of the world.
The Democratic candidate proposed to "bring back the kind of foreign policy that characterized the Truman administration with Marshall and Acheson and Kennan but also characterized to a large degree the first President Bush with people like Scowcroft and Powell and Baker...a fairly clear-eyed view of how the world works, and recognized that it is always in our interests to engage, to listen, to build alliances--to understand what our interests are, and to be fierce in protecting those interests, but to make sure that we understand it's very difficult for us to, as powerful as we are, to deal with all these issues by ourselves.
"We need to show leadership...through pulling people together wherever we can. There are going to be times where we have to act unilaterally to protect our interests. And I always reserve the right to do that, should I be commander in chief."
On the overriding issue of Islamic extremism, Obama said he would "hunt down those who would resort to violence to move their agenda, their ideology forward. We should be going after al Qaeda and those networks fiercely and effectively.
"But what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.
"And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors...result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues."
The Republican spin machine will doubtlessly characterize that nuanced attitude toward American power in a complex and dangerous world as naïveté, weakness and vacillation. If voters believe that, we could be in for four more years of disastrous Neo-Con certainty, mock macho and isolation from the rest of the world.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Insanity Over Iran
We're in recurring nightmare territory here. Today's Zogby poll shows more than half of voters would support a military strike to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon and believe it likely the U.S. will do so before next year's election.
On PBS' News Hour, normally an oasis of rationality in the TV news desert, we have a solemn debate about attacking Iran between Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and Norman Podhoretz, the Neo-Con relic Rudy Giuliani is propping up to prove he is a true conservative.
When Zakaria points out we have used deterrence and containment against nuclear threats from China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, Podhoretz accuses him of "an irresponsible complacency...comparable to the denial in the early '30s of the intentions of Hitler that led to what Churchill called an unnecessary war involving millions and millions of deaths that might have been averted if the West had acted early enough."
If Zakaria's informed rationality and Podhoretz's apocalyptic drool are given equal weight as two sides of the argument, we may be headed for another Iraq, propelled by the same political and media cowardice of five years ago.
The Senate passes the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment designating the Iranian Revolution Guard as a terrorist organization by a vote of 76 to 22, with Hillary Clinton, among other Democrats, failing to see that the Bush-Cheney Administration will surely use it to justify an attack on Iran without seeking Congressional approval.
Such willful blindness now leads to apparent public approval of what would surely be another act of national insanity, putting American troops in harm's way in three Muslim countries based on no compelling national interest beyond the loopy theories of a gaggle of armchair warriors in a discredited lame-duck Administration.
To top it all off, we have Rudy Giuliani war-mongering for votes in New Hampshire by accusing Clinton and Obama of wanting to negotiate with bad people and debating whether to invite Ahmadinejad and Osama to "the inauguration or the inaugural ball."
Why aren't more politicians and media people speaking out about this recurrence of madness?
On PBS' News Hour, normally an oasis of rationality in the TV news desert, we have a solemn debate about attacking Iran between Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and Norman Podhoretz, the Neo-Con relic Rudy Giuliani is propping up to prove he is a true conservative.
When Zakaria points out we have used deterrence and containment against nuclear threats from China, the Soviet Union and North Korea, Podhoretz accuses him of "an irresponsible complacency...comparable to the denial in the early '30s of the intentions of Hitler that led to what Churchill called an unnecessary war involving millions and millions of deaths that might have been averted if the West had acted early enough."
If Zakaria's informed rationality and Podhoretz's apocalyptic drool are given equal weight as two sides of the argument, we may be headed for another Iraq, propelled by the same political and media cowardice of five years ago.
The Senate passes the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment designating the Iranian Revolution Guard as a terrorist organization by a vote of 76 to 22, with Hillary Clinton, among other Democrats, failing to see that the Bush-Cheney Administration will surely use it to justify an attack on Iran without seeking Congressional approval.
Such willful blindness now leads to apparent public approval of what would surely be another act of national insanity, putting American troops in harm's way in three Muslim countries based on no compelling national interest beyond the loopy theories of a gaggle of armchair warriors in a discredited lame-duck Administration.
To top it all off, we have Rudy Giuliani war-mongering for votes in New Hampshire by accusing Clinton and Obama of wanting to negotiate with bad people and debating whether to invite Ahmadinejad and Osama to "the inauguration or the inaugural ball."
Why aren't more politicians and media people speaking out about this recurrence of madness?
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