The World Isn’t So Dark

Fareed is right on. Fear based foreign policy leads to lots of missteps. Obama got it right. America is at its best when we play it smart and calm. Disagree with Wiseman of Ethiopia. We American tax payors have every right to hold goverments accountable when we financially support them with our tax dollars. The current undemocratic regime of Ethiopia terrorizes its own people and denies its people God-given democratic rights. Mr. Feingold's Ethiopia Human Rights Act attempts to hold the undemocratic government of Ethiopia accountable for the foreign aid America provides to Ethiopia. I think America should continue to hold receipients of foreign aid accountable. This is a smart US foreign policy.

I agree with you, but I am not an American, I am an Ethiopian, the problem lies there. Your ideas got acceptance in the rest of the world not in America, that is why America is most of the time not effective in her foreign undertakings. Take for instance the recently drafted bill refered to as `Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Ethiopia Act of 2008'. This bill has no any legal ground to be drafted for Ethiopia, a sovereigne country, by an American congress, because a law should pass through the Ethiopian Parliament to be enacted in the soil of this great nations country. This is the ABC of International relations studies. But Senators like Mr. FEINGOLD would like to delebrately miss it. But we Ethiopians definetely sure that this bill will not be enacted in our land. But the proud senate and cogress of America is loosing its precious time on a matter that couldn't be realistic at the very begining.

The War on Terrorism, like the War on Drugs, is pointless political theater. Which is fine except that it is monstrously expensive. Americans do not see themselves as the royalty that they are. We live like kings compared to most of the world. Carter's reaction to the unrest in Iran in the 70s is telling - while he was dining with and pledging support to the Shah there was righteous indignation in the streets because of previous American mis-intervention. We arrogantly ignored it and continued to rape them and other countries for oil and other resources. The chickens are coming home to roost. Luckily there is still a lot of goodwill toward the actual people in the US if not for Bush and other leaders. I agree that Obama has all the right answers and will salvage our relationships overseas. Hopefully this recent financial crisis will continue to be described as the final verdict against supply-side chicago-school reaganomics. Own your failure, neo-cons - the average productive American worker is the one deserving of special care and support, not the Wall Street frat boy who packages weak mortgage debt into a marketable security and makes a fast buck. Rich and White does not mean Right. God didn't choose you to be a millionaire. More unions, immigration amnesty, and stronger entitlements will trigger productivity from the ground up. That is what truly works in America.

Why do you say that Obama wants to restore military strength when he has stated he will decrease our military? I don't get it.

All of this petty bickering about the wrong subject again and, not surprisingly, printed by a biased CORPORATE news outlet. Have we considered how we're going to pay for all this policing around the world, preemptive strikes, and still meet our domestic liberal government commitments over the next 20 years? If you said yes then perhaps you should pinch yourself and wake up now. The fact is the U.S. is broke and fast approaching a very dark time. Over the next 20 years we will have to print so much money to pay for the interest alone on our debt that the U.S. dollar won't be worth the paper it's printed on. The dollar is backed by NOTHING EXCEPT FAITH and that faith is quickly disappearing. One of 2 things are going to happen and neither is acceptable for most Americans. First, we will have to join the North American Union and use the Amero (American Euro) backed by Mexico and Canada - I agree it's not a pleasant thought. Second, we WILL have to raise taxes to roughly 80%-90% of our incomes for at least a decade while at the same time cut federal spending to roughly 25% of what it is today. I'm glad I won't be alive to see the day when corporations pack up and head to China after they've destroyed and raped this country. Good luck to all of you and remember -- keep fighting the petty, irrelevant fights that FOX News and MSNBC keep stirring up on a nightly basis while you keep your head in the sand. Go ahead and run up charges on those credit cards. If you're gonna screw it up, do it right. Don't halfass your demise into bankruptcy. Keep spending and spending while you still have a chance because I'm not sure how much longer it will last.

I may be wrong but it seems terrorists won't have to use nuclear weapons on us, they just have to sit back and wait for us to destroy ourselves due to greed and stupidity.

We all know there are elements in the world that wish for our destruction and even in our own country those elements exist. I general however what he says is quite true no matter what you may think or believe the US can not just go about killing and bombing whomever we please whenever we please. If let us say Canada did to America what we do to Pakistan from Afghanistan we would go to war with them but it is ok if we do it, we are the good guys. I believe you will find a VERY large portion of this planet does not see us as saviors nor the good guys. Having traveled all over this earth and listened to many individuals from countries around this globe many see us as a great country and many do not. We fear when the Chinese or the Russians establish any type of foothold in this hemisphere yet do it in Europe and expect everyone to be happy. As much as we would like to believe it we do not run the planet and as the years move forward I fear we will begin to see that the world regards us as a place to sell their products and not much more.

An interesting perspective. I'm a McCain fan, but the writer's perspective agrees with my own.

But if you don't agree, look at it another way. If the world is tired of our aggressive stance in fighting the evil regimes, let us become like Europe and call for change behind the safety of our podiums. If the writer is right, this will be effective enough. If the writer is wrong, the evil will build and the free world will beg for our intervention as it did in WWII and in 1990s Yugoslavia. People hate American miltary intervention until they need it.

How can you say Mr. zakaria is pro-obama? First of all his one of the few journalist who dares to write well balaced stories! Secondly, CNN is owned by the Turner network which is Por-Liberman, which is pro-McCain!
Want a good stoory read it here http://www.chilitoz.com all about Sarah palin and mccain!

finally somebody who speaks up against this paranoia which is very typical for America. Don't always assume the worst and see the devil in everything which does not fit your point of view, relax, everybody wants to live in peace, even if he (she) is not the mainstream American. People are so very brainwashed by the media, most can't think clear and many are unable to differentiate between reality and what they are made to see.
This is still a wonderful, great country, the people are good, let education get a big boost and things will be better soon.

Slayer1624,

As for extreme Obama bias by CNN, I believe it was true that CNN was biased towards Obama during the primary season. The reason I think has not so much to do with overt political bias as to the bias towards novelty. Novelty is what gets eyeballs. Right now, Obama is old news and Palin is the new kid on the block. So we're seeing the same thing play out with Palin today as we saw with Obama months ago. And as a counterpoint to your argument, the very first headline I saw today was "Some find 'Obama waffles' offensive" which actually was an article about some people who created a business out of selling packaged waffles with anti-Obama cartoons on them. So much for bias...

While in general, his theis is correct, there are exceptions. Sure the domino theory of the Vietnam era was certainly flawed, but it was correct about the type of regime that followed in the steps of the Viet Cong triumph.

Say what one about GWB, but think of today with Islamic extrememism "contained" in an unbroken belt stretching from the Mediterranean (Syria and Lebanon) to the Indian Ocean (Pakistan). Comforting thought, no?

While he might have done the correct thing in Iraq and Afghanistan militarily, there was no understanding sufficient to succeed the authoritarian and religious tribal structure endemic to the cultures. I think the sentiment was it was going to be like the liberation of Paris in WWII all over again, a serious miscalculation.

The point is, we have to live with the actions and go forward in the best interest of all parties involved, with the indigenous population as the top priority. Neither rapid evacuation nor forced occupation is a viable solution. That wiser course will be more easily reached when political stereotyping is abandoned and a more rational debate including the affected indigenous people is engaged. Name calling leads nowhwere near a lasting solution.

Flashsback1,

Are you serious that you don't care if the WTC buildings came down by fire or not? So what you're saying is that you don't care that the government lied to you. And you don't care that maybe the perpetrators weren't Muslim extremists and that maybe all of our efforts at the war on Muslim extremists are based on false information? Maybe it was Muslim extremists, but the truth is that we simply don't know and at the rate we're going, we're never going to know. Ask yourself the question, "hypothetically, what if the government knowingly lied about 911?" What are the ramifications?

Now I didn't bring up anything with respect to Obama and McCain in my earlier post, but just for the record, let me state that I am likely to vote Obama in Nov (or possibly a third party). The reason has not so much to do with the supposed good qualities of Obama nor does it have much to do with the supposed bad qualities of McCain. Rather, I simply cannot support a party that has allowed the current administration get away with a series of lies starting on 911 and continuing to today.

It is refreshing to read an article that deals with the rancid fear-mongering policies of American foreign policy over my lifetime, and especially the current administration. You illuminate the imbalance that has permeated not only our politics but our lives as well. It belittles us as a people and as the current world power. It has dominated our thinking and our behavior for far too long. Nine-Eleven has joined with Pearl Harbor as an icon of national tragedy, and deservedly so. But 9/11 should motivate us toward introflection, to see and understand ourselves better, and to discern the tremendous ripples that emanate from our every action world wide. We must see 9/11 as a lighthouse in the night, a guiding light to awaken us to the the disregard we have practiced during our tenure as world leaders toward the rest of the world's peoples and their concerns. We have regarded ourselves as separate from rather than as a part of the rest of humankind, and have lost some of our own humanity in the process. Todays problems are increasingly global ones. They can't be resolved by any country alone. They don't recognize national borders, or boundaries of any other kind that we are used to acknowledging. Any hope of a successful response to many of them will require cross-cultural communication and cooperation on a level never experienced in human history . In the choice of leadership offered in the 2008 election, McCain is undisputedly standing for the status quo; the same one that caused the problems that wlll dominate our future world. Obama is the one that sees the need to build the kind of relationships with other countries around the world that will be required for any success in dealing with the global issues of that future. I don't say this as a partisan; I say it as an American deeply concerned about the future of my country and my planet. I agree with your evaluation of McCain and Obama in terms of their views and approaches toward international relations. Abraham Lincoln had even less "experience" than Obama has now, and Lincoln became arguably the greatest President ever, because he had a more comprehensive world view than his contemporaries. I sense the same in Obama.

Fareed, I think 9/11 was a very dark day indeed.

As most CNN Analysts, Zakaria is pro-Obama, whose main purpose is to portray any Republican candidate as a war-monger. In this article he has accomplished his objective. Although I don't see McCain as an extension of Bush, McCain is far more practical and in actuality far less interested in forcing all the governments of the world to adopt a democratic model. But truth and an unbiased article is not the objective. Promoting Obama is. Just another extreme example of CNN bias.

Everything can be, and is, written in the mindset of it's author. I am not saying every muslim is bad. I am saying that "talking" to extremists that have no regard for life is not the answer. Suicide bombers will not stop because someone tries to rationalize with them. They are made out to be heroes to the people that think like them. Look at history...Saddam Hussein gassed his own people because they did not "think" like him. Do you think Obama's "talking" to them is going to make any difference whatsoever? I don't. Personally, I really don't care about whether the WTC towers came down by fire caused by burning jet fuel or not.....it still was the result of terrorists taking planes and intentionally attacking us. Let us not forget too that because of that...our lives were changed forever. We do not have the same kind of freedom we had and we never will.