Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (35277)	7/18/2008 2:56:26 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 224738

Unlike George W. Bush, who entered the presidential race in 2000 with scant exposure to national security issues, Obama has served since his election to the Senate in 2004 on the Foreign Relations Committee and has had a running tutorial from aides steeped in the issues. His campaign says that he is well prepared and that he often alters and expands on the talking points provided to him by his foreign policy advisers. Most of the core members of his team served in government during President Bill Clinton's administration and by and large were junior to the advisers who worked on his wife's campaign for the Democratic nomination. But they remain in charge within the campaign even as it takes on more senior figures from the Clinton era, like two former secretaries of state, Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, and are positioned to put their own stamp on the party's foreign policy. Most of them, like the candidate they are working for, distinguished themselves from Hillary Rodham Clinton's foreign policy camp by early opposition to the Iraq war. They also tend to be more liberal and to emphasize using the "soft power" of diplomacy and economic aid to try to advance the interests of the United States. Still, their positions fall well within centrist Democratic foreign policy thinking, and none of the deep policy fissures that have divided the Republicans into two camps, the neoconservatives and the so-called pragmatists, have opened. Obama's core team is led by Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Clinton administration, who has pushed for a tougher response to the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, and Anthony Lake, Bill Clinton's first national security adviser, who was criticized for the administration's failure to confront the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and now acknowledges the inaction as a major mistake. The core group also includes Gregory Craig, a former top official in the Clinton State Department who served as the president's lawyer during his impeachment trial; Richard Danzig, a navy secretary in the Clinton administration; Mark Lippert, Obama's former Senate foreign policy adviser, who just returned from a navy tour of duty in Iraq; and McDonough. McDonough and Lippert are paid by the campaign and based in Chicago, and the rest are outside advisers who volunteer their time from Washington.

To: Geoff Altman who wrote (35277)	7/18/2008 2:57:31 AM
From: puborectalis	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 224738

July 18, 2008 Editorial A Seat at the Table We welcome the news that President Bush has decided to send one of his top diplomats to talks on Iran’s nuclear program. That is quite a change from just a few months ago when Mr. Bush denounced as appeasement any effort to talk to “terrorists and radicals.” It is very late in the game, but we hope this means that Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are learning the lessons of seven years of failed foreign policies built almost completely on isolating (or attacking) America’s adversaries. There is little chance of solving major international problems so long as this country refuses even to have a seat at the table. We also hope it means that Vice President Dick Cheney and his crew have given up their dangerous fantasy of bombing away Iran’s nuclear ambitions — or at least have been overruled by the president. It has been two years since the United Nations ordered Iran to stop enriching uranium. Tehran continues to defy that order, and its scientists are getting ever closer to mastering a process that is the hardest part of building a nuclear weapon. The United States and other major powers (Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia) have tried to use a mixture of incentives and sanctions to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But neither the rewards nor the punishments have been especially persuasive. China and Russia, which have strong economic ties to Iran, have blocked tough sanctions, while the Bush administration has not made a credible offer of improved relations and security guarantees and had refused to sit down at the negotiating table. Mr. Bush’s decision to send William Burns (Ms. Rice’s third in command and a well-respected former ambassador to Russia) to join the European Union’s foreign policy chief and other top diplomats in talks with Iran makes any incentives package look more credible. It also shifts the diplomatic pressure back to Tehran. And it will make it harder for Beijing and Moscow to resist imposing a new round of sanctions if Iran remains obstinate. Washington could do even better — with the Iranian people, international opinion and possibly Iran’s leaders — if it followed up with an offer to open an interests section in Tehran. The administration is grudgingly asserting this is a “one-time-only” deal and that Mr. Burns will not negotiate with the Iranians or hold separate meetings with them. We welcome Mr. Bush’s willingness to try diplomacy for a change. But he might do even better if he didn’t trumpet his ambivalence quite so loudly.