Thanks to Mustapha, I stumbled upon a pretty good piece by Friedman. I gotta say, I like #5 the most.
As I have argued before: When you have leverage, talk. When you don’t have leverage, get some. Then talk.
Right now Iran & Friends — Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria — have a strategy that has produced leverage for them, and the next U.S. president is going to have to think afresh how to counter it. The “Iran & Friends” strategy is built on five principles:
… Principle No. 5: Cast yourself as the “resistance” to Israel and America, so any opposition to you is equal to support for Israel and America and so no matter how badly you are defeated the mere fact that you “resisted” means you didn’t really lose.
Nice. He’s spot on.
Here’s hoping that once the primary silly season is over, the McCain and Obama camps will stop jousting over whether to talk with our enemies — which we must — and will start focusing instead about how we and our friends get more chips to bargain with — which we lack.
I couldn’t agree more.
Meanwhile, I have some advice for McCain. Ronald Reagan had an amazing rhetorical ability to infuse hope and a lot of optimism together with stances that acknowledged the real Soviet threat. People are tired of cynicism and gloomy talk. Obama’s strength is his charisma and uplifting approach. He speaks about the future with a bright sense of hope. McCain doesn’t.
I can’t wait for the one-on-one televised debates between Obama and McCain. Should be a lot of fun watching them. Plus, I still need to make a final pick and go with it. Being the classical liberal I am, I lean right, although I wouldn’t want a Dick Cheney-style neo-con as president. But then again, I wouldn’t want a Jimmy Carter-style one too.
Gosh, I have a headache. The debates should make things a lot easier. Here’s hoping they reveal a lot of substance rather than silly smears.
SudaneseThinker
SudaneseThinker
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
“Obama’s strength is his charisma and uplifting approach. ”
I find him extremely depressing.
I would also like a US president who still remembers the difference between American and Russian forces and the European and Pacific theatres of World War II.
Liberals were making jokes about Doublebush’s stupidity, and now they are fielding Obama?
“I find him extremely depressing.”
That’s coz you don’t like him. I’d say both McCain and Obama have good things going for them but we’ll get to know them better during the one-on-one debates… hopefully.
“That’s coz you don’t like him. ”
Yes, because he is depressing.
If Obama didn’t have a racist spiritual mentor and would actually TELL anybody what his politics will be (”change” is not a policy), I might like him.
But at the moment I simply don’t know what he stands for, especially since he takes back his words so often.
So he will withdraw troops from Iraq? He wants to end the war, I suppose. But so far he hasn’t explained how withdrawing American troops will end the war.
John McCain’s wife adopted a daughter from an orphanage in Bangladesh.
http://www.dadmag.com/archive/060400jmccain.php
Plus his son fought in Iraq.
And Obama spent twenty years seeing a racist hate preacher as his spiritual guide and thinks that Auschwitz was liberated by American Pacific troops.
So it’s really close between the two. How could I possibly decide between them?
Leave a Comment