Soft on Iran?

Thanks eddiewhere for the real and alive comment. So I, as an Iranian, can recognize somebody somewhere could speak about the reality of this part of the world. Yes, being free is our most important dilemma, and I ask president Obama to enclose the relationship as the first and last way to solve a 3 decades estress for Iran people

We need to get out of Iraq and transfer responsibility and management of that country to the IRAQ's themselves. THEY SHOULD be backed by a multinational force led by Middle Eastern countries until they are able to fight extremist on their own.
Our unilateral approach in the MIDDLE EAST has to come to an end. ECONOMICALLY, IRAQ IS KILLING the average tax payer and making a few private contractors and oil firms rich.

We need Oil. WE NEED OIL. Therefore, getting rid of the Iranian regime is at the top of our agenda.
The majority in Iran want change but not under and American led invasion. It has to be done from within. We lost the support of moderate Arabs and Muslims over the last six years. Hopefully, PRESIDENT OBAMA can empower this group and encourage them to meet with their counterparts.

Inotherwords there should be an alliance between all moderates in the Middle East, JEWS, ARABs, MUSLIMS, ect... These forces must be self motivated by a common cause, Peace. IF this group can be strengthened they themselves will defeat or at least contain the force of extremism.
WE must strengthen the forces behind peace and weaken those against peace on both sides.

THE UNITED STATES CANNOT SOLVE THE CONFLICT IN THE MIDDLE EAST. WE CAN ONLY STRENGHTEN AND SUPPORT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE EAST TO SOLVE THEIR OWN PROBLEMS.

IN THE SHORT RUN WE NEED MIDDLE EASTERN OIL. THIS COMPLICATES OUR ROLE OVER THERE.
WE Should have had an ENERGY SUMMIT TEN YEARS AGO. WE NEED TO COME UP WITH A TWENTY YEAR PLAN to RID OURSELVES of OIL DEPENDENCY IN THE MIDDLE EAST. TWENTY YEARS WILL GO BY LIKE NOTHING. WE HAVE TO START NOW.

THE most dangerous threats are the ones you do not see coming. LIKE CHINA, RUSSIA, EASTERN EUROPEAN organized crime. Monitoring these entities will be our great challenge.
ARE WE READY FOR CYBER WAR. I DON't THINK SO.

You need to view the video of Obama's speech on Foreign Affairs he gave this month in Foreign Policy Summit in Washington DC. the title on Youtube is:
Barack Obama: Foreign Policy Summit in Washington DC

"pearl harbor"
You post lots of words. Too bad most of your sentiments are filled with generalizations, stereotypes and an obvious hate for anyone anti-Bush/McSame. You must have been one of the sheep that voted Bush into office.
On a basis of intelligence: Obama WIns.
Who has less political baggage, corrupt connections: Obama.
For someone who has "no experience", Obama knows more about Foreign Affairs than McSame or Bush.

Obama supporters should We petition and ask Pentagon to Probe and setup Commission Committee about discrepancy Entry of John McCain into Annapolis Academy as Naval Officer Pilot,he's only HIGH SCHOOL graduate,yet being Commissioned as Naval Officer let alone as Pilot,Does this have anything to do his Father position as Admiral?should he be only Qualified to be Private or Cpl with his HIGH SCHOOL qualification?As a Pilot he was shoot -down twice,This shouldn't be a surprise to many,as his IQ level is Low to be Qualified as Pilot.?

Check his TRUE education level,when he entered Miliatary arms with HIGH SCHOOL certificate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Formative_years_and_education.

Obama supporters should We petition and ask Pentagon to Probe and setup Commission Committee about discrepancy Entry of John McCain into Annapolis Academy as Naval Officer Pilot,he's only HIGH SCHOOL graduate,yet being Commissioned as Naval Officer let alone as Pilot,Does this have anything to do his Father position as Admiral?should he be only Qualified to be Private or Cpl with his HIGH SCHOOL qualification?As a Pilot he was shoot -down twice,This shouldn't be a surprise to many,as his IQ level is Low to be Qualified as Pilot.?

Check his TRUE education level,when he entered Miliatary arms with HIGH SCHOOL certificate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Formative_years_and_education.

Pearl Harbor: and saber rattling has gotten us where? Oh yeah that's right 4000 + US soldiers dead, gas rising faster than the temperature outside (100 degrees, AGAIN) and food skyrocketing to the point that if you hadn't THOUGHT about garden you should consider it now. What the F??? This is the point that Obama has been trying to make the entire time. We (yes the US) is making Iran stronger by doing what we know doesn't work and the definition of insanity is??? Read the article and the only one flip flopping all around is McCain.doesn'tdoesn't WTH

Pearl Harbor: and saber rattling has gotten us where? Oh yeah that's right 4000 + US soldiers dead, gas rising faster than the temperature outside (100 degrees, AGAIN) and food skyrocketing to the point that if you hadn't THOUGHT about garden you should consider it now. What the F??? This is the point that Obama has been trying to make the entire time. We (yes the US) is making Iran stronger by doing what we know doesn't work and the definition of insanity is??? Read the article and the only one flip flopping all around is McCain.doesn'tdoesn't WTH

THIS IS THE ARTICLE THAT GIVES A MORE COMPLETE ASSESSMENT OF HATE AGAINST AMERICA.

WHETHER YOU BOMB IRAN OR YOU DONT... YOUR AMERICAN CIVILISATION IS NUMBERED AS FAR AS THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS CONCERNED.

MCCAIN IS MAKING AN ATTEMPT.... BUILDING A NEW IRAQ IN NEXT 100 YRS (5O YRS FACTOR OF SAFETY AS COMPARED TO BUILDING MODERN JAPAN AFTER WW2)..... TO SHOW TO THE ANTI-AMERICANS THAT THE US GOVERNMENT IS DEAD SERIOUS AND COMMITTED TO PROGRESS AND PEACE... NOT ONLY FOR AMERICA BUT FOR THE WHOLE WORLD.

SPEECHES OF SUPPORT AND RETALIATION OF WAR CAN NEVER GIVE YOU RESULTS TO REBUILD THE NAME OF AMERICA.

THE ROAD IS LONG AND HARD... BUSH IS BRAVE ENOUGH TO TAKE THAT ROAD... WILL YOU HELP HIM REGARDLESS OF YOUR OWN OPINION OF HIM LIKE MCCAIN (WHO HAS SO MUCH TO REVEL ON CURRENT SITUATION OF BUSH IN THE EYES OF THE PEOPLE)?

THE CHOICE IS YOURS.

Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. This is excerpted from the September/October issue of Foreign Policy.

The Falseness of Anti-Americanism
By Fouad Ajami

"America is everywhere," Italian novelist Ignazio Silone once observed. An idea of it, a fantasy of it, hovers over distant lands and peoples. And everywhere there is also an obligatory anti-Americanism. Witness the duality of the United States as Satan and redeemer. The same embassies targeted by the masters of terror are besieged by visa-seekers dreaming of the golden country. It is of green cards and houses with lawns, far away from the mullahs, that the crowd in Tehran chanting "marg bar amrika" ("death to America") really dreams.

CONTINUATION:

The world rails against the United States, yet embraces its protection, its hipness, the American ways and techniques. In Doha, Qatar, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, arguably Sunni Islam's most influential cleric, delivers sermons on the arrogance of the United States. Egyptian-born, political to his fingertips, and in full mastery of his craft and of the sensibility of his followers, he thunders that the United States has appointed itself judge and jury in Iraq.

But a great deal of the United States had gone into the preacher's art: Consider his Web site, Qaradawi.net, where the faithful can click on his religious edicts in Arabic and HTML. Or what about his way with television? He is a star of the medium, and Al-Jazeera carried an immensely popular program of his. That art form surely owes a debt to the American "televangelists," as nothing in the sheik's traditional Cairo education prepared him for this wired, portable religion.

And then there are the preacher's children: One of his daughters had made her way to the University of Texas where she received a master's degree in biology, a son earned a Ph.D. from the University of Central Florida, and yet another son embarked on that quintessential American degree, an MBA, at the American University in Cairo. Al-Qaradawi embodies anti-Americanism as the flip side of Americanization.

To come bearing modernism to those who want it but who rail against it at the same time, to represent and embody so much of what the world yearns for and fears--that is the American burden. To the Europeans, and to the French in particular, who are enamored of their laïcisme (secularism), the United States is unduly religious, its culture suffused with sacred symbolism. In the Islamic world, the burden is precisely the opposite: The United States scandalizes the devout and is an affront to the pious. According to a June BBC survey, 78 percent of French polled identified the United States as a "religious" country, while only 10 percent of Jordanians endowed it with that label. Religious to the secularists, faithless to the devout--such is the way the United States is seen.

CONTINUATION:

Many populations have the United States under their skin. Their rage is oddly derived from their attraction. Consider Saudi Arabia, a place where anti-Americanism is fierce. The United States helped pull the desert enclave out of its insularity and ushered it into the twentieth century. Today, Saudi cities mimic U.S. suburbs, and their ruling elites are formed and educated at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

A culture that casts so long a shadow is fated to be emulated and resented at the same time. The United States is destined to be fixed in the politics--and imaginations--of strangers even when the country accurately believes it is not implicated in the affairs of other lands. People cannot be talked out of this kind of anti-Americanism. Though Jordan is the recipient of a U.S. free-trade agreement, a privilege the United States shares only with a handful of nations, 71 percent of Jordanians believe the United States is more dangerous to the world than al-Qaeda. A sense of disinheritance has always hung over Jordan, and anti-Americanism emanates from it.

CONTINUATION:

CONTINUATION:
In Greece, hatred of the United States is now a defining feature of political life. The United States offended Greece by rescuing Bosnians and Kosovars. The same Greeks who hailed the Serbian conquest of Srebrenica in 1995 and the mass slaughter of the Muslims there were quick to summon up outrage over the U.S. military campaign in Iraq. Greece is part of NATO and of the European Union, but the ethno-nationalism of Greece spins a narrative of Hellenic persecution at the hands of the United States.

The aggrieved glide over the role the U.S. played in the defense and rehabilitation of Greece after World War II. They overlook the lifeline that migration to the U.S. offered untold numbers of Greeks, where they now prosper. The malady here is a Greek variant of what plays out in the world of Islam: a belligerent political culture that, in an abdication of political responsibility for one's own world, searches for foreign "devils."

It is regularly argued today that the United States, in its post- 9/11 hubris, summoned up today's anti-Americanism. But these sentiments have long prevailed in Jordan, Egypt, and France. It was during the 1990s that the Islamist children of Egypt set off for Hamburg and Kandahar to hatch a horrific conspiracy against the United States. And it was in the 1990s, during the fabled stock market run, when the prophets of globalization preached the triumph of the U.S. economic model over the protected versions of the market in places such as France, when anti-Americanism became the uncontested ideology of French public life. Americans were barbarous, a threat to French cuisine and their beloved language. Wall Street speculators were raiding their savings.

Much has been made of the sympathy that the French expressed for the United States immediately after the September 11 attacks, as embodied by the famous editorial of Le Monde's Jean-Marie Colombani, "We are all Americans." But Colombani was soon back with a tone of belligerent judgment and disapproval in his book All Americans? The World After September 11, 2001. There was nothing to admire in Colombani's United States, which he described as a fundamentalist Christian enterprise, its magistrates too deeply attached to the death penalty, its police cruel to its black population. The United States had not squandered Colombani's sympathy; he never held that sympathy in the first place. Colombani was hardly alone in the French intellectual class: On November 3, 2001, French writer and pundit Jean Baudrillard sketched the perpetrators of September 11 as acting out his own dreams and the dreams of others like him. "All the world without exception dreamt of this event, for no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of a power that has become hegemonic. . . .It is they who acted, but we who wanted the deed."

CONTINUATION:


It is not "mostly Bush" that turned France against the United States. Envy of U.S. power, and of the United States' universalism, is the ruling passion of French intellectual life. Foreign minister Dominique de Villepin appeared evasive at one point on whether he wished to see a U.S. or an Iraqi victory in the standoff between Saddam Hussein's regime and the United States. Anti-Americanism of this sort indulges France's fantasy of past greatness and splendor, and gives France's unwanted Muslim children a claim on the political life of a country that knows not what to do with them.

That sensitive French interpreter of his country, Dominique Moisi, recently told of a simple fellow countryman who, when Saddam Hussein's statue fell on April 9 in Baghdad's Firdos Square, expressed a sense of diminishment that his country had sat out this stirring story of political liberation. A society like France with a revolutionary history should have had a hand in toppling the tyranny in Baghdad. Instead, a cable attached to a U.S. tank had pulled down the statue, to the delirium of the crowd. It was soldiers from Burlington, Vermont, and Linden, New Jersey, and Bon Aqua, Tennessee who raced through the desert making this new history and paying for it.

The United States need not worry about hearts and minds in foreign lands. If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence. In the age of Pax Americana, it is written, fated, or maktoob (as the Arabs would say) that the plotters and preachers shall rail against the United States. And they will do so in whole sentences of good American slang.