Who Cares Where Spain Is?

In addition, Spain suffered a horrfic terrorist attack because of thier invovlement in Iraq. This is just not any ally. He should know.

How a candidate sees the world, that is the hard part about both of these guys. McCain reminds me to much of Bush in his wish to alienate us from the rest of the world. He seems quick to dismiss Russia out of hand, forgetting that they still posses the ability to devastate the entire Northern Hemisphere. He seems to be hell bent on using military action against Iran, ignoring the possible Russia response, ignoring the fact it could lead to a shoot war between the United States and Russia. He seems to ignore a lot of facts and that is troubling.

Obama is by no means perfect, he can be to pragmatic sometimes, he tends to over think an issue, he wants to have all the facts and that is not always possible. Obama believes dialog is the best answer and all things being equal I would agree however, things in this world are not always equal. Obama disappoints because he goes along with McCain and the Bush Administration of this silly idea of a missile defense system. Our government seems to be ignoring the threat of Russia using nuclear weapons against Poland should we install this system.

It may be saber rattling, then again it could be a credible threat. Is Russia willing to risk a nuclear exchange with the United States, is Obama, McCain and Bush? So far, while I plan to vote for Obama, I have seen nothing from any of the candidates that instills confidence, I have seen nothing from any of the candidates that tells me they truly understand what we are facing. It is troubling but what is more troubling is McCain being President, I feel he will have us in another war, possibly with Russia within six months of taking office. A shooting war with Russia does not bode well for the continuation of mankind, if you know what I mean? Just as a side note, I do not exactly get warm a fuzzies about Obama either but his pragmatic mind set is less likely to have us in a war than McCain, less chance of some knee jerk reaction.

bla

Anyone who actually listened to the McCain interview with Spanish media should be disturbed more by the campaign's insistence that the Senator intended to insult PM Zapatero and his NATO ally country, than the moe probable explanation that McCain's often faulty hearing in complex situations gave him no clue that the conversation had switched from Latin America to Europe. The cover up story speaks reams about the character flaws John McCain 2008 just can't conceal. How many times has he said, "I know.... I have experience..., i know how to win/fix it..... when in fact he doesn't. He'll have us looking for that elusive Iraqi Pakistani border or putting missile defense systems in Czechoslovakia before you can say" I was a POW..." I.m sorry but it does matter when the man who would be king doesn't have the bearings to know where most of the world is at this moment in history,.

It is a funny article at that!

How long has it been since the USSR was changed to Russia?

Though through this turmoil in Iraq the facts are people are dead.

Not knowing their way around a map, but popularity.
Not having a clear solution for the 21st century, but popularity.
Not governing states to advancement in civil rights, but popularity.

Committing to changing policies in 1999; for less government involvement in personal wealth was the mistake that brought down the dow and caused this financial fiasco.

Suggesting that someone from the SEC, or any government agency for allowing this fiasco to happen is a direct assault on American intelligence. That bill was signed to allow this in the first place. The original FDR bill; was to avert this happenstance.

Popularity forgets foreign policy, American financial policy, and the average interest in civil rights, popularity is more important than education, history, science; it makes losers not patriots.

Popularity is why China isn???t an issue. Popularity is why the economy isn???t an issue. Popularity is the reason why Russia is still an issue. Not the USSR for that is no longer an applicable name for this Region in Europe!

It will be interesting to see who will truly overtake America, because of this sole interest in being popular. Let???s face it; that is what will happen the more popular the candidate, not the more able the candidate.

So I suppose an aging popular McCain; and a beauty contest winner will have the ticket for 4 years. Hey, since the beauty Queen lives close to Russia I guess that makes her viable for foreign affairs. She at least knows where it is on a map, but only through demographics!

We don???t need to be popular; we have over 200 channels on the TV! Those infomercials can lie; I suppose that is why we so need a politician to do so as well; it is the popular choice.
.

In a few weeks we will make a choice that will decide our future.
I follow an economist named Bob Proctor. He has called the top and bottom of every market crash since the 70s correctly.
Also, he perfectly predicted the current real estate market meltdown and the picture he paints about what will happen in the next couple years
is terrifying.He thinks it will be worse then the great depression.
The banks in the U.S. are going under one after the other. Countrywide the largest morgage bank in the world,Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch which are 3 out of the top 5 wall street firms. Also, Fanny and Freddy Mae which hold 50 percent of the home loans in the United States.
The government took them over because they are essentially bankrupt.If they didn't the entire financially system would virtually shut down, the stock market would crash and we would suffer beyond what any of us have seen before.

McCain just like Bush " doesn't understand the economy".
That not just my opinion its his own words. Not only does he not understand how to fix it but he does not understand exactly what is broken.
It is no surprise that he doesn't. The people that make up these securities use complex mathematical models very few people understand.
Bush and McCain both can take the credit for this mess since they helped deregulate the laws that were protecting us.

Bush's economic advisor Phil Graham wrote the deregulation bill that allowed banks to take huge risks with all of our future.
Now, Phil Graham is the head of McCain's economic policy.He is also McCain's choice for the next secretary of the treasury.
No one in this country can afford for that to happen. The last time Bush met with his economic advisors was in March. He either didn't care or didn't realize that anything was wrong. Phil Graham had the guts to say that we are in a mental recession after he helped create the worst economy meltdown in our lifetime.
It will take the best and brightest minds in the world to get us out of this nightmare. As bad as Bush has done, McCain would be
even more destructive because things are in much worse shape. The next president will not inherit a surplus like Bush did but a tanking economy and a 11,600,000,000,000 (trillion) dollars deficit. Most of it Bush created and it will take decades to pay it back.
If you do what you have always done then you will get what you have always got.
When it comes to policy Bush and McCain are the same 90 percent of the time.
So why are the polls even close then ?


The chairman of McCains campaign recently said that people don't vote on issues they vote on a personality composite. Which means he is trying to sell you personality instead of results.

He believes people will vote against their own interests.

Let's teach him we are smarter than that .

Hold them accountable NOW! while it will still help.

Elect Obama Biden 2008

Mr Haas, are you serious? Maybe you and your fellow angloamerican elite who has been running US foreign policy for decades do not care where Spain is. After all, you are part of protestant tradition based on the denigration of Spain since at least the XVII century ( the Black Legend about the conquistadores, the Inquisition and so on...). But a future president of the US at the begininning of the XXI century should know where Spain is for several reasons at least. I wil give you a few data to consider why Spain is relevant indeed for the US:
Spain is the 8th largest world economy, the 8th largest world donor, the sixth largest world investor, the first or second investor in Latin America ( depending on the country) and the fourth largest investor in the US ( all according to OCDE statistics). Telefonica is the third largest world telecom operator, Banco Santander the fith major world bank. Zara the second largest world retailer, Iberdrola the second largest renewable energy company, seven out of the first ten infrastructure companies in the world are Spanish...and so on Furthermore, Spain has played a major role in world history and also in US history. It was Spain, not France, the country which provided more material help to the American insurgents against the British ( an independent US reciprocated by appropiating most of the remaining Spanish territory in North American and by declaring an illegal war against Spain over Cuba- remember the Maine?). Spain is also a major contributor to stability operations from Libanon to Afghanistan ( alongside the US) and it has an active diplomacy not only in Europe and Latin America, but also in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Subsaharan Africa. Its language and culture are shared by more than 400 million people around the world....Furthermore, Spain has a unique geopolitical position: it controls the Gibraltar Strait and is a political, economic and demographic turning point between Europe, Africa and Latin America.
So it is not that you do not care about where Spain is, it is simply that your opinion on this is simply based on prejudice and/ or ignorance.... And you are the head of the Council of Foreign Relations, the leading US think tank on foreign policy....oh dear, no wonder the US is lost alone in the world.
.

It's not just knowing where Spain is located. It's his questionable behavior during a crisis. John McCain is frightening me.. How he reacts to crisis is setting off alarms. He is reacting and not thinking things through? His immediate response to the Economic crisis is troubling. His ranting to Russia about Georgia is troubling. His forgetting that Spain is our ally is troubling. Having reoccuring cancer and choosing Sarah Palin is
troubling.

n a few weeks we will make a choice that will decide our future.
I follow an economist named Bob Proctor. He has called the top and bottom of every market crash since the 70s correctly.
Also, he perfectly predicted the current real estate market meltdown and the picture he paints about what will happen in the next couple years
is terrifying.He thinks it will be worse then the great depression.
The banks in the U.S. are going under one after the other. Countrywide the largest morgage bank in the world,Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch which are 3 out of the top 5 wall street firms. Also, Fanny and Freddy Mae which hold 50 percent of the home loans in the United States.
The government took them over because they are essentially bankrupt.If they didn't the entire financially system would virtually shut down, the stock market would crash and we would suffer beyond what any of us have seen before.

McCain just like Bush " doesn't understand the economy".
That not just my opinion its his own words. Not only does he not understand how to fix it but he does not understand exactly what is broken.
It is no surprise that he doesn't. The people that make up these securities use complex mathematical models very few people understand.
Bush and McCain both can take the credit for this mess since they helped deregulate the laws that were protecting us.

Bush's economic advisor Phil Graham wrote the deregulation bill that allowed banks to take huge risks with all of our future.
Now, Phil Graham is the head of McCain's economic policy.He is also McCain's choice for the next secretary of the treasury.
No one in this country can afford for that to happen. The last time Bush met with his economic advisors was in March. He either didn't care or didn't realize that anything was wrong. Phil Graham had the guts to say that we are in a mental recession after he helped create the worst economy meltdown in our lifetime.
It will take the best and brightest minds in the world to get us out of this nightmare. As bad as Bush has done, McCain would be
even more destructive because things are in much worse shape. The next president will not inherit a surplus like Bush did but a tanking economy and a 11,600,000,000,000 (trillion) dollars deficit. Most of it Bush created and it will take decades to pay it back.
If you do what you have always done then you will get what you have always got.
When it comes to policy Bush and McCain are the same 90 percent of the time.
So why are the polls even close then ?


The chairman of McCains campaign recently said that people don't vote on issues they vote on a personality composite. Which means he is trying to sell you personality instead of results.

He believes people will vote against their own interests.

Let's teach him we are smarter than that .

Hold them accountable NOW! while it will still help.

Elect Obama Biden 2008

Still, I'd like my candidate to at least have taken Geography 101 - before trying to graduate. If you think confuse Spain for a country in Latin America and don't know that it is one of the few allies we have left in the world, we're in big big trouble. Likewise, if you don't know the nuances between Sunni & Shiite or the history of why things are the way they are today, you won't know what is appropriate, what can work and what won't work. Building permanent bases in a Muslim country will not work. Period. They view it as a holy war, and will not ever invite us to build bases on their lands. Iraq is not Germany.

Bush did not know the difference between Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Neither did McCain. For that reason, we are involved in a disastrous war in Iraq. Invading Iraq after 9/11 made about as much sense as invading Brazil after Pearl Harbor. Georgia might have been a "trivial gotcha question", but McCain's ignorance of the conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia - a conflict that has been going on for nearly two decades, is dangerous. Similarly neither Bush, McCain, or even Haas has any understanding of developments in North African, sub-Saharan Africa, or even Turkey where Islamic fundamentalism is gaining ground, partially because of our occupation in Iraq and partially because of the soaring unemployment rate in many African cities. (African magazines like Jeune Afrique and Afrique Magazine have written extensively about these problems - but because Haas presumably does not speak French, he doesn't understand.) We need a president with a grip of these developments. McCain who can't even place Spain on the right continent is NOT your man.
Equally dangerous is Haas' obsession with the past. There were never real "winners" in Vietnam. The idea that we win or lose countries, like they are pieces on a Monopoly board, is itself absurd. Similarly, I really defy Haas to explain to me what "winning" Iraq means. I do not see any clear victory there of any kind. Similarly it's phenomenally ignorant for Haas or any one else to claim that we "won" the Cold War. Actually the foot soldiers in the battle against the Evil Empire were the members of Solidarity, Poland's first independent labor union. Ironically, McCain and the Republicans are trying to destroy labor unions in this country.. It's equally fatuous to claim Reagan's famous Berlin Wall speech in 1986 ended the Cold War. Actually, for years the Evil Empire was crumbling under the weight of its own lies and deceptions. By 1986, any one who was half way intelligent could understand that the days of the Evil Empire were limited. Even Gobrachev understood that. The basic reason he instituted Glaznost, which was too little, too late.
Haas wants Obama and McCain to tell us what lessons we've learned from the past. The big problem with this approach is that inevitably when we look to the past, we get the wrong answers. We fought in Vietnam because we were looking back at 1938 - wrong analogy and wrong war. Inspired by Reagan's famous tear down the wall speech,, Bush felt that he could command Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq and install Ahmed Chalabi as president. That did not work. McCain has inherited the same stupidity. He thinks he can command Iran to shut down its nuclear program or Russia to be nice to George. It does not quite work out that way. Worse, like the old USSR, we are making the same idiotic mistakes. (The Russians, incidentally, are quite aware of this. We need a president who sees into the future, not the past. That's Obama

Your article is excellent but the questions you pose are as likely to be asked by the debate moderator as an ice cube's chance in hell. The issue of hell may be discussed in the debate however.

It matters that leaders have a basic understanding of the world. It alarms me when candidates don't know the leaders of our allies.Spain is an important ally in the war on terrorism. That should be basic knowledge. If a candidate doesn't know this info., it shows they spend little time thinking about the world. There needs to be a basic curiousty on a candidates part about these issues. Not seeking out this information shows a lack of interest. That's G Dub in a nutshell. Guess the comparisons between McCain and W aren't to far off after all.

Mr Richard Haass :

Good article and reasoning but, but, but .....

This sentence of yours is wrong :


"It would be useful, for instance, to know what McCain and Obama judge to be the reasons we won the cold war, lost Vietnam and nearly lost in Iraq."

So Iraq has not been lost.

So the hearts and minds of the Iraquis have not been lost, They are going to forgive the thousands upon thousands of their own deaths. Their relatives, fathers, uncles, sons, brothers, or sisters and daughters.

Because women and children have also died in Iraq. Old folks have also died in Iraq.

I am not sure that Iraq has been won. Or that people in Iraq love America.

Vicente Duque