No one could accuse President Barack Obama or Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa of harboring ill will toward the president of the Palestinian Authority. But their separate worthy initiatives have resulted in pushing Abbas into a no-exit hell while lowering the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Afghanistan is not alone. The Obama...]]> Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 WASHINGTON -- America's vast spaces inspire such fear and uncertainty for the country's inhabitants that at times they snap, reach for an ever-present firearm and blaze away at their fellow citizens. This narrative comes from a European friend to explain the Fort Hood massacre, as well as those that preceded it and those yet to come.

Expansive explanations flourish in this morbid interim period, when we know what happened but not exactly why or how. Working backward, we impose our deepest fears, resentments and expectations on a pattern that is suddenly astonishingly clear. Of course, we exclaim, as we read the comments gathered by reporters from former neighbors, associates and...]]> Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's extended hand was whacked across the knuckles by the leaders of Iran, Syria and assorted other thuggeries last week. But the Obama administration did manage a good demonstration in Burma of how its brand of engagement can and should work.

Kurt Campbell, the State Department's top Asia official, traveled to the isolated military dictatorship to talk with its corrupt junta. But Campbell also insisted on having a highly visible meeting with the leader of the country's democracy movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, and then called publicly on her persecutors to grant her party more freedoms.

This is the balance that has been missing in Obama's outreach to...]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Old age is a shipwreck.

-- Charles de Gaulle

WASHINGTON -- Revolutions notoriously eat their children. But France's political system reserves its sharpest cruelties for elderly politicians as they fall from favor, as de Gaulle learned in 1968. Now it is the turn of former President Jacques Chirac, who was ordered on Friday at age 76 to stand trial on 32-year-old corruption charges.

Let's be honest. Many Americans will be delighted. They remember only Chirac's final bitter years in power, when he fought the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and set out to build "multipolar" coalitions of nations to reduce U.S. "hegemony" now and forever.

But this is...]]> Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 OTTAWA -- Candidate Barack Obama made the North American Free Trade Agreement an early target. He promised union leaders to force a renegotiation of NAFTA on his terms. Back then, I thought Obama went too far. Now I think he did not go nearly far enough.

Canada, the U.S. and Mexico must form a more perfect economic union to deal with a lingering international financial crisis that drains the U.S. dollar of value and credibility, and fuels rising unemployment. Regional integration is a rare effective response to faltering globalization, dangerously volatile petroleum markets and U.S. economic and military overextension.

So, yes, Mr. President, renegotiate NAFTA. But move its...]]> Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Is President Obama dithering on Afghanistan, as critics claim? Or do loyalists praising his deliberate pace have it right? Both camps rush past the obvious: The president is almost certainly applying a calculated, coldblooded squeeze on his partners in the Afghan endeavor to get what he needs for a successful policy.

Obama is orchestrating a drawn-out review that is actually a policy instrument itself. That reality is (happily for Obama) obscured by the miasma of leaks, counter-leaks and guesswork that has settled over official Washington. But three things are absolutely clear:

First, Hamid Karzai cannot be accepted as the legitimate ruler of Afghanistan on...]]> Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Gobsmacked by President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize? You have come to the right place. Chalk it up to the national character of my ancestral homeland.

Norwegians have spent centuries living down the Vikings' lust for conquest and adventure. But they have never quite exterminated it. The result is a nation of well-meaning idealists who cannot resist meddling if they can insist it is all in a good cause. Perfect background for a columnist, did I hear you mutter? Or for a committee telling Americans how much they should honor and support their new president?

My compatriots several generations removed intend this award to a first-year U.S. president as a down...]]> Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Three American presidents have set the stage for a grand bargain that could align the interests of the world's leading powers in Europe and the Middle East. It is now up to Barack Obama to play out that opportunity by keeping his eye on the forest as well as the trees.

The main obstructions in President Obama's line of sight are Afghanistan and Iran. He has allowed or encouraged aides to stage a debilitating semi-public debate over whether Afghanistan needs a troop surge or a drawdown. They have confused manpower with strategy. On Iran, No-Drama Obama has abruptly switched to confrontational threats that will be difficult to enact. He has rattled allies while not...]]> Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 NEW YORK -- President Obama's dream of a world without nuclear weapons seems more like a nightmare to Russia and other nations that also possess doomsday arms. Obama is pushing on a door that is closed, barred from inside and locked with a key that has been thrown away as far as the Kremlin is concerned.

This harsh reality does not mean that the president should abandon his effort, which is a useful tool in his broader, more urgent campaign to change America's image abroad. It does mean that Obama should temper his rhetoric and avoid adding atomic abolition to the growing list of subjects that he oversells and then seems to struggle to control. See health care, bankers' bonuses...]]> Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 MOSCOW -- The world's economic crisis does not seem to have been unkind to you, Vladimir Putin notes as we sit down to a lunch that begins with calf's tail in aspic. "You all look well fed, well dressed."

It is a spy's gambit, one of several that the Russian prime minister advances subtly to compromise or co-opt 45 foreign academics, think-tank experts and journalists gathered in his opulent dacha at Moscow's outer edge. Don't be hypocrites, he is saying without saying. Don't try to trap me with do-good, abstract questions. We're in this together.

The next 150 minutes of good-natured discussion, political bombast about Soviet history and clever positioning leave little...]]> Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The aftermath of Afghanistan's elections has been uglier and more consequential than the campaign that preceded the voting. It has become clear that President Hamid Karzai's bid for re-election was tainted by widespread fraud, a development that represents the Obama administration's first significant failure in foreign affairs.

The administration had emphasized that its primary goal was a credible election process, not the victory of any particular candidate or group. President Obama and his aides had sharply urged Karzai publicly and privately to make this vote as close to fair and free as possible in a country at war. Karzai not only disregarded the pressure; he...]]> Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Japan's voters have thrust power on an incoherent coalition of hungry politicians distinguished only by their willingness to promise anything to anybody anytime. Good for them. In many ways we should applaud the Japanese who voted for what is being described as "change they can't believe in."

The distorted echo of President Obama's campaign slogan is hardly accidental. Japan's Aug. 30 national election may turn out to be the first of many examples of the Obama factor reshaping politics in other countries. The victorious Democratic Party of Japan skillfully linked their opponents to George W. Bush and free-for-all, destructive capitalism, while identifying themselves...]]> Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Moammar Gaddafi leaned across the couch and surprised me with the question he posed, squinting as he searched my face for reaction: "Why do you drink poison?"

I could guess where the Libyan dictator was headed but asked him to explain. During a news conference, we had just engaged in a verbal confrontation over terrorism and he had asked to see me alone -- perhaps, I thought, to articulate his position better, or just to arrest me. "Alcohol," he said through an interpreter. "You people in the West poison yourself with alcohol. You are fools."

That 1973 interview in Tripoli and an even more venomous conversation with Gaddafi 14 years later accustomed me never...]]> Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Shortly after the Group of 20 summit concluded in London in April, Nicolas Sarkozy blurted out to a small group of advisers a question that weighed on him as he watched President Obama glad-hand his way through the gathering: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?)

The French president did not answer his own blunt query, which faded as the American leader commanded a hectic round of domestic economic intervention and agenda-setting abroad in the weeks that followed. Initial doubts about Obama's toughness went on the shelf at the Elysee Palace and elsewhere.

But the Sarkozy question was abruptly dusted off as Obama began hitting resistance to some of his most ambitious goals, including...]]> Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Shortly after the G-20 summit concluded in London in April, Nicolas Sarkozy blurted out to a small group of advisers a question that weighed on him as he watched President Obama glad-hand his way through the gathering: "Est-il faible?" (Is he weak?)

The French president did not answer his own blunt query, which faded as the American leader commanded a hectic round of domestic economic intervention and agenda-setting abroad in the weeks that followed. Initial doubts about Obama's toughness went on the shelf at the Elysee Palace and elsewhere.

But the Sarkozy question has abruptly been dusted off as Obama starts hitting resistance to some of his most...]]> Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 KORCULA, Croatia -- The enterprising folk of this Adriatic island town now use the past to propel themselves into the future. As they do, they offer a glimpse of a certain idea of promise for all the Balkans.

Disregarding many histories that put Marco Polo's birthplace elsewhere, or record it as unknown, Korculans claim the Venetian Republic explorer as a native son, industriously dedicating souvenir shops, cafes and a bare-bones nativity site to him without so much as an asterisk.

"This is brilliant," a successful Latin American businessman and friend said admiringly as we trudged up the rickety staircase of "Marco Polo's House" to discover it led only to a viewing...]]> Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- I love writing about control freaks. They cannot resist responding in ways that prove my point.

I once received a telephone tongue-lashing at dawn from a Treasury secretary identified in that morning's column as being overly sensitive to criticism. And earlier this month, when I suggested that the Obama White House and the Clinton State Department might not have precisely the same agenda on all issues, I was rebuked with a staged display of public harmony between these institutions. I had committed the moral equivalent of ringing Dr. Pavlov's dinner bell for the administration's message commissars.

More on that tiff in the policy-sandbox in a moment. The...]]> Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- President Obama's surge in Afghanistan has a year to show that the increase in U.S. forces and aid can turn the tide there. It is not an open-ended commitment of American troops and money.

Iran needs to respond to Obama's offer of engagement before Sept. 24, when the Group of 20 major economies will meet in Pittsburgh. If Tehran does not accept, the U.S. will ask Russia, China and other key nations to go the U.N. and impose tougher sanctions on Iran.

That summit is also the moment when Obama will assess progress toward new Middle East peace negotiations by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian Authority and Arab states. They can deal with...]]> Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Surprised to see the news the other day that the Obama administration is sending an ambassador back to Syria? So was Hillary Clinton's State Department. Officials there were still negotiating with Damascus to win some movement on Middle East issues when President Obama's decision was leaked.

The diplomatic consequences of a rare crossed wire within this controlled administration are difficult to measure. Syria was being asked to help stop terrorist acts such as the bombings that hit northwestern Iraq last week, diplomatic sources tell me. But Syrian promises on terrorism are notoriously unreliable. Little of substance may have been lost by the poorly timed...]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The Robert S. McNamara who helped lead the United States into defeat and shame in Vietnam would never have anticipated or trusted what I am about to recount. None of the computers he depended on to chart that war could quantify serendipity or instinct.

I'm not sure what the other McNamara -- the remorseful and melancholy ex-president of the World Bank I came to know long after Vietnam had ended -- would have made of this circumstance: Word of his death at 93 reached me as I was talking about the history and future of counterinsurgency in Asia with a 23-year-old Army lieutenant who is looking ahead to a tour of combat duty in Afghanistan within a year.

The...]]> Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 VENICE -- Europe will be wrangled for the next six months by a lanky no-nonsense Swede named Carl Bildt. His country chairs this semester's cascade of European Union summits, procedural debates and other gabfests. As Sweden's foreign minister, it is Bildt's job to make sense of it all -- a task akin to herding not cats but eels.

Well, he asked for it, didn't he? Bildt ignored the dangers of answered prayers -- of getting what you wish for -- when he was Sweden's prime minister in the 1990s. The conservative politician relentlessly overhauled his country's socialist economic policies and neutralist orientation to push it into the EU. Now Sweden is stuck with picking up the pieces...]]> Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 PARIS -- "President" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's brutal clampdown on his opponents is a tragedy for Iranians. But the shredding of Iran's pretensions of being a stable, democratic state may offer longer term positive change in the Middle East.

Such an outcome is far from guaranteed -- and is likely to come only after sharp new regional tensions or even violence sparked by Iran, Israel, or both nations acting separately in reinforcing fashion. The idea that the use of force can make things better has not been abandoned in the Middle East.

The election crisis has entered the all-important moment of interpretation by Iran and its neighbors. What counts now is not what Washington...]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- The most serious challenge that Iran's Islamic rulers have faced in their 30 years in power caught President Obama and many European leaders by surprise. Their intelligence agencies did little to prepare them for a national catharsis that now pits a combustible mixture of youthful, idealistic protesters and older political opportunists against Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

By threatening and then delivering repression blessed by his religious authority, Khamenei has turned an election dispute into a crisis of legitimacy for a regime that claims to be divinely inspired. Obama's decision to stay out of the limelight in responding to the protests is paying off in the sense of...]]> Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- France's attitude toward U.S. policy on Middle East peace? "We totally agreed." How about Iran? "Totally aligned on this." Personal relations? "It is a pleasure to work with Barack Obama."

Thus said French President Nicolas Sarkozy at a joint news conference during President Obama's recent European drop-by. Remarkable by the standards of the often prickly French-U.S. relationship, such solidarity was even more striking coming from Sarkozy, a combative Frenchman who does not sweet talk peers in the world leadership club.

More often he lashes out at them, in impatience or from an internal rage that seeks any outlet he can find. Ask Germany's Angela Merkel. Or...]]> Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Foreign lands define themselves to us through national symbols long before we learn their languages or customs. The bear reminds us to be careful of Russia and Germany, the rooster crows for France, Britain fronts the haughty lion while we Americans identify with high-flying, lonely eagles.

But for much of the 20th century, the car -- the more powerful and flashier the better -- represented the modern American way of life to the world. The restless ambition to move up and on, diversity of choice and the embrace of excess that are hallmarks of American society run through the country's love affair with automobiles and highways. The car defines for many Americans who...]]> Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- Memo to President Obama:

Cling to one thought as you work on your greatly anticipated speech to the Muslim world in Cairo Thursday, Mr. President: There is no American solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that you can heroically deliver from on high. Peace must be built from the bottom up by the warring sides. Cling to that thought, but keep it to yourself.

It would be pleasing to your hosts to suggest the opposite -- to outline a made-in-the-USA plan for the Middle East. Some of your aides believe this is a special moment that can bring an end to the region's Sixty Years' War if you intervene forcefully enough. But that approach neglects history and the...]]> Sun, 24 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- George W. Bush's refusal to work with Congress and other nations to update national and international legal norms to fight al-Qaeda immediately after 9/11 now haunts the nation and his successor. Bush's stubborn rejection of sharing authority, and responsibility, left us to fight a 21st-century enemy with mid-20th-century instruments of justice.

Today the failure to grasp the need for change created by the globalization of crime and punishment has migrated to the opposite end of the spectrum -- to the ACLU and other critics on the left who absurdly accuse President Obama of adopting the Bush agenda on national security as his own. They are now the ones who are stuck...]]> Sun, 17 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- President Obama's effort to block the release of photographs of U.S. prisoner abuse is a mistake that can be corrected. The president acts with good intentions -- and a profound understanding of the over-stimulated times and society in which he lives. That alone represents progress at the White House.

Former Obama allies rush to accuse him of being a hypocrite and moral coward for contradicting himself on the issue of torture and accountability. The trophy for immediate odious hyperbole goes to Anthony D. Romero, head of the ACLU, who suggested that the Obama administration is "covering up not only for the Bush White House, but for itself."

Ouch, counselor....]]> Sun, 10 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500
WASHINGTON -- South Africa has selected a new president in its fourth democratic and peaceful national election since its liberation from apartheid. So much for the cynics' slogan "one man, one vote, one time" as the unyielding rule of African politics.

Orderly transfers of power have become routine in the nation once known as the world's racial powder keg. So the election of Jacob Zuma last week drew scant mention in the U.S. media or from the American government -- even though Zuma is one of the most colorful, controversial and now important new leaders on the international scene.

Zuma's successful drive to deny Thabo Mbeki a third presidential term certainly had...]]> Sun, 03 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- President Obama will not twit, I have been authoritatively informed. Or should that be tweet? Unsure about the correct verb form for sending Twitter messages, I turned for guidance to my authoritative informer, Macon Phillips, the affable young, Internet specialist who is in charge of the White House's new media office.

He seemed unsure as well. "But I don't think the president is the right person for this. There are better ways to engage the micro-blogging community," he told me, explaining at another point: "We try to find the audiences where they are, and deliver the president's message to them at the best delivery point."

The targets include audiences...]]> Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 WASHINGTON -- President Obama's national security aides are struggling to conclude a strategic review of U.S. policy toward Iran. It is certain to be comprehensive, imaginative -- and largely silent to irrelevant on the most difficult choices about Iran that Obama will face over the next year or two.

The review cannot be completed until Obama has what may be his toughest meeting yet with a foreign leader. That Oval Office session with Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's newly elected prime minister, will come in mid-May. Netanyahu's impressions of Obama's intentions on Iran will determine war-or-peace choices for the Middle East.

The survey of American options on Iran forms a...]]> Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 MEXICO CITY -- And now a little heresy from your friendly foreign affairs columnist for President Obama: Stay focused on fixing the American economy. Avoid pleasant distractions created by dealing with foreign leaders and crises without congressional interference. Stay out of the honey-tree trap of commander in chiefism.

Most of all, Mr. President, in this tone- and template-setting moment, remember that shots fired in anger abroad on your watch are no different than they were under George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. They are generally not personal, and not a test of your manhood, whatever your critics and supporters say in their self-perpetuating efforts to tear you down or build...]]> Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The video, apparently shot on a cell phone and given to a human rights activist, is not surprising in itself. The brutal subjugation of poor, uneducated women in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan is widely if incompletely known in the West. But the brief, blurry images are revealing.

The recent U.S. strategic review, as well as learned tomes and countless op-ed columns, depict the struggle in the desolate border lands of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier as being rooted in fierce nationalism, the region's ancient warrior culture, the failures of nation-building, and the rebirth of jihadist terrorism.

But this video reminds us of another driving force too often neglected or...]]> Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 First, though, an aside: Enough already with this embarrassing deportation case against Zeituni Onyango, who won a reprieve last week to stay in Boston until next February for a full hearing on her asylum request. Her case is so unusual and so public, and her vulnerability now so high, that only the most rabid immigraphobes would take the chance of putting this 56-year-old woman in harm's way.

Obama says he has not lifted a finger to help the aunt who guided him around Kenya 20 years ago. The careful image of keeping his distance from a relative embroiled in political as well as legal controversy is consistent with the discipline and unsentimental calculation that...]]> Sun, 29 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Zhou Xiaochuan, China's central bank governor, got in his licks on the bank's Web site. He called for gradually "removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies" (i.e., the dollar) to settle international debts and accumulate savings. His essay showed Beijing's growing concern that President Obama's massive spending programs will decimate the $2 trillion China holds in foreign reserves, primarily dollars.

But Zhou was reflecting misgivings that also surface in calls by France and other nations for a "Bretton Woods II" international economic agreement. His paper was strategically timed to get this week's G20 summit in London to focus on...]]> Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 While the administration this week begins a well-publicized Afghan "rollout" -- D.C.-speak for a coordinated but segmented sales job of a new initiative to Congress, the media and diplomats of other nations -- Holbrooke will be in Brussels to brief NATO allies privately on the strategic review ordered by Obama.

Then the president crosses the Atlantic to address three leadership summits, including NATO meetings in France and Germany April 3-4. Obama should be wise enough to avoid making a major issue of seeking new European troop commitments to Afghanistan. He will not want an air of confrontation to hover over a 60th anniversary gathering that will also celebrate...]]> Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 His caution was a red flag for me because of a different question I have been putting to the random Obama Cabinet secretary or senior official I trip across during this president's baptism by financial fire: Do you sense that the American people are angry about the economic collapse they are enduring, with no end in sight?

A two-step answer almost always comes back: No. Concerned, but not angry. Pause. Not yet.

Choose your image: a ticking time bomb, a pile of kerosene-drenched kindling, an entire people balancing on a precipice. This is how the American public is being portrayed in some private discussions going on at the top of this understaffed...]]> Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600 President Obama's confidence in Biden's versatility and talents is outranked only by that of, well, Biden in himself. This week the VP is helping shape the new multilateral engagement that Obama has promised. The Bush team figured out who America's enemies were and left it to other nations to decide if they were our friends. Obama is determined to do it the other way around.

But that may sound simpler than it is in a global economic crisis that pushes governments to pursue self-interest more ardently. Traditional alignments and the roles of all established international organizations are up for grabs. Foreign friendship and enmity increasingly come in shades of gray that...]]> Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600 That is, the pivot Obama is making is much larger and more difficult than he has acknowledged. He seemingly made a down payment on a new Afghan strategy by dispatching 17,000 additional U.S. troops there. But concern is spreading through Med-Ind that the move actually masks a determination by Obama to draw down -- after a decent interval -- the American presence and power in that area.

The president is clear that he intends to order all U.S. combat troops from Iraq before the 2010 U.S. midterm elections. And diplomats and analysts in touch with the White House increasingly suspect that the Obama team hopes for major reductions in Afghanistan before this four-year...]]> Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But Obama is launching his ambitious effort to lead the world with sweet reason as the foundations of the American economy seem to crumble. This increases the danger that the president's offer to cooperate with former adversaries will be seen or portrayed as a sign of weakness. (If mere Republican members of Congress slap Obama's extended hand, imagine what Kim Jong-Il or Vladimir Putin might do.) Obama must carefully manage the paradox of power and penury he has inherited.

The fact that the twin economic and financial crises are global in nature could work in his favor. Almost every other major power is in worse shape than the United States. That is certainly the case for...]]> Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Three things need to be said:

(1) The analysis by Obama & Co. is accurate, and is shared by U.S. allies, particularly Britain, which has effectively given up on Karzai. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer recently published an op-ed article in The Washington Post blasting Karzai after checking its tone and content with the Obama White House.

(2) The administration is tactically shrewd to dial down public expectations for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It has shifted the focus instead to halting the country's slide into ever-greater violence and instability -- the modest goal Gen. David Petraeus has now enunciated for himself as Central Command boss....]]> Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But by the standards of the past -- and of the rough neighborhood in which Iraqis still live -- the two general elections that Iraq has held in four years stand as paragons of progress and adaptation that others in the region should aim to emulate. That development should not be ignored or minimized, particularly as the United States and Europe wrestle with analogous problems that confront a newly besieged Afghanistan. Even more important than shifting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan may be shifting counterinsurgency lessons learned.

Another signpost suggests that Iraq is closer today to being a source of regional stability than it ever was in its pre-American era, when Saddam...]]> Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 That is a task that falls to Muslims themselves. At its core, this struggle is over the future of Islam. Obama must work hard to make sure that his well-intentioned gestures of comity do not obscure this reality -- and do not provoke a new whiplash of resentment and doubt if they do not bring the results he wants.

Even Israelis should applaud the president's decisions to direct his first overseas telephone call to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, to grant his first televised interview at the White House to al-Arabiya's Hisham Melhem, and to send special envoy George Mitchell on a "listening tour" that began not in Jerusalem but in Cairo.

"This underlines that...]]> Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Obama does not have that particular need or temperament. His earliest words and deeds make clear that foreign leaders will be dealing with a revitalized U.S. government and a strong foreign policy team, not exclusively with a presidential pal. Despite his relative youth and inexperience, Obama arrives among them as a professor and moral philosopher -- not as the sermonizing warrior of faith that Bush was.

The world has moved from the era of the American preacher into the era of the American teacher. Bush made much of having exorcised his personal demons and said we could all overcome external evil through belief. Obama tells us that our biggest problems lie within -- as...]]>