The US wants democracy! Just ask anyone! Anyone in America, that is. From the outside, it doesn't really look that way.
Put me in the 21% who don't think it looks that way from the this side, either. Full, depressing report from The Pew Research Center For People and The Press.
Arianna Huffington, apparently, thinks us boys at The Staton Jones Report are hot stuff. She writes in her weekly column for Salon that blogging is the closest thing we have to Thomas Paine's political works in the public square. I'd agree that bloggers can cover stories as they see fit, but I have to admit that getting the story out quickly is often more exciting than getting it right. Even so, it's nice to be wanted:
I've got a confession to make. I've got a big-time crush. I'm talking weak-in-the-knees infatuation. But it's not Brad or Orlando or Colin or any of the cinematic hunks du jour who have set my heart aflutter. No, it's Atrios and Kos and Josh Micah Marshall and Kausfiles and Kevin Drum and Wonkette. Bloggers all. Yes, when it comes to the blogosphere, I'm a regular cyberslut. And I don't care who knows it. Bring on the fines, Michael Powell!
Good Op-Ed by Joseph Nye that appeared last week in the Washington Post:
Long before the recent bombings in Madrid, polls showed a dramatic decline in the popularity of the United States, even in countries such as Britain, Italy and Spain, whose governments had supported us. And America's standing plummeted in Islamic countries from Morocco to Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, the world's largest Islamic nation, three-quarters of the public said they had a favorable opinion of the United States in 2000, but within three years that had shrunk to 15 percent. Yet we will need the help of such countries in the long term to track the flow of terrorists, tainted money and dangerous weapons.
After the war in Iraq, I spoke about soft power to a conference co-sponsored by the Army. One of the speakers was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. When someone in the audience asked Rumsfeld for his opinion on soft power, he replied, "I don't know what it means." That is part of our problem. Some of our leaders don't understand the importance of soft power in our post-Sept. 11 world.
The United States is more powerful than any country since the Roman Empire, but like Rome, it is neither invincible nor invulnerable. Rome did not succumb to the rise of another empire but to the onslaught of waves of barbarians. Modern high-tech terrorists are the new barbarians.
As we wend our way deeper into the struggle with terrorism, we are discovering that there are many things beyond U.S. control. The United States alone cannot hunt down every suspected al Qaeda leader hiding in remote regions of the globe. Nor can we launch a war whenever we wish without alienating other countries and losing the cooperation we need to win the peace.
The war on terrorism is not a clash of civilizations -- Islam vs. the West -- but rather a civil war within Islamic civilization between extremists who use violence to enforce their vision and a moderate majority who want such things as jobs, education, health care and dignity as they practice their faith. We will not win unless the moderates win. Our soft power will never attract Osama bin Laden and the extremists. We need hard power to deal with them. But soft power will play a crucial role in our ability to attract the moderates and deny the extremists new recruits.
The Globe and Mail published a story today about the International Energy Agency's report calling for much higher prices for oil and gas to stem the environmental damage caused by its use.
"We believe that oil prices in the seventies and eighties did more to reduce emissions and improve efficiency than what happened with the policies of the nineties," says Fridtjof Unander, a senior energy analyst at the IEA and the author of the report released earlier this month. Even steep pump price increases will take years to push consumers into more fuel-efficient vehicles, the IEA warns, pointing to a painfully slow path to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector. "There are no quick answers to transport," Mr. Unander says.
The article contends that the only stimulus to the energy sector that reduced consumption and increased efficiency was large and long-term increases in the price of fuel. Once consumers became convinced that high prices were a permanent fixture of the economy, they adjusted their choices. The trend started with the first two oil embargos of the seventies, but reversed itself in the nineties when gas prices were kept low by the first President Bush's quid pro quo with the Saudis and Kuwaitis. The report says, in effect, that pain at the pump is the only long term way to reduce consumption.
This entry introduces the category for news and perspective from outside the U.S.'s "bubble".
Today in The Globe and Mail, a cover story shows that Canadians overwhelmingly think the U.S. (and President Bush in particular) lied about the capabilities of Saddam's WMD to justify an illegal war.
"Two-thirds (67 percent) of adult Canadians said they agreed with the statement that Mr. Bush 'knowingly lied to the world to justify his war with Iraq' a year ago, The Globe and Mail-CTV News poll says.
Moreover, almost three-quarters (74 percent) of the poll respondents said that the federal [Canadian] government made the correct decision by not joining the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq, the polling data show.'
Ironically, 87 percent of respondents think that the world is a better place without Saddam. Tell that to the Spanish.