gandalf: Not to sound partisan, but it was Fareed Zakaria that penned that hagiographic little missive.
Picking up on surveyor’s mention of labels: The article indentifies Tony Lake as a “pragmatic Neo-Wilsonian”. Huh? Wilson was a high minded, progressive idealist, as exemplified by his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations. He was very embittered after the Treaty of Versailles and especially France’s handling of Germany following WWI. I’m not sure what the pragmatic version of that looks like, but it must be interesting. It also illustrates something of a sleight of hand, in that Zakaria attempts to “turn” certain words and labels to a different meaning, and it conflates Obama’s worldview with those people and periods where “American Realism” (whatever the hell that is) worked.
Zakaria employs key words like progressive, and realist, all within the rubric of establishing Obama’s “vision” as being equal to a Wilson, or an Acheson or Kennan (the last two being very capable Cold Warriors and vigorous enforcers of the containment strategy against the USSR). However, as surveyor rightly points out, Obama lacks a fundamental sense of history, especially the all-important facts, which then provides the context, which then provides the solution.
Islamic terrorism, as practiced by al-Qaeda, has nothing to do with poverty, other than it recruits well from poverty stricken parts of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. However, al-Qaeda’s core tenets call for the establishment of a worldwide Islamic Caliphate that will bring everyone into conformity and compliance of Shari’a (Islamic law). That makes attacking the problem very different than if it was solely driven by poverty.
Clinton made the same mistake when he considered dealing with terrorism to be a law enforcement problem. It wasn’t and isn’t.
