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Showing posts with label Iraq War. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq War. Show all posts

Tuesday 20 September 2016

People's Daily criticizes USA as " source of turnmoi in the world "

霸气!党报狠批美国为世界“动荡之源”


导读:尽管和平与发展是当今世界的主题,但是局部冲突依旧不断,而这背后,或多或少都有美国在插手。


党报狠批美国_英语新闻网

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, has criticized the United States as the "source of turmoil in the world."

北京9月18日电 中国共产党官方报纸《人民日报》批评美国为“世界动荡之源”。

The newspaper on Sunday published three articles by Chinese scholars to analyze the causes of expansive and hegemonic moves by the United States from systemic, ideological and strategic perspectives.

《人民日报》于周日发表了三篇由中国学者撰写的文章,从内在体制、意识形态、国家战略方面分析美国的扩张和霸权主义运动。

An editor’s note on the page said that U.S. interventions are behind unrest and disputes in many places, including the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the South China Sea.

报纸上一位编者的卷首语写道,多地的动荡和纷争背后都有美国的插手,包括中东、东欧和南海。

"The United States is keen to make messes in the world, cast shadows on order and stability in multiple regions and jeopardize peace and development in relevant countries," the note said.

“美国热衷于在世界制造混乱,给多个地区的秩序与稳定投下阴影,对相关国家的和平与发展构成威胁。”卷首语写道。

An article by Yang Guangbin, a professor of politics at Renmin University, pointed out that the "military-industrial complex," which former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against, is "kidnapping U.S. domestic and diplomatic policy."

杨光斌,人民大学政治学教授在文中指出,美国前总统艾森豪威尔曾警告说,“军事工业复合体”正“绑架着美国的国内和外交政策”。

The "military-industrial complex" naturally demands war and military expansion, resulting in the Iraq war, "Arab Spring" uprisings and growing tensions with Russia and China, Yang said.

“军事工业复合体”自然是要求战争和军事扩张,这就导致了伊拉克战争、“阿拉伯之春”起义以及与俄罗斯和中国关系的不断紧张。

Yang also criticized the United States for selling its ideology, which has brainwashed the elite in some non-Western countries.

杨光斌还批评了美国推广其意识形态,这洗脑了一些非西方国家的精英分子。

"Countries that have followed American-style ’liberty and democracy’ are not turning into American-style states. Instead, their lives remain the same, or even become worse," the article said.

文章写道,“信奉美国‘自由民主’的国家并没有因此而变成美国式国家,依然过着自己固有的日子,甚至境况更差。”

Another article by Li Wen, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, noted that the United States’ eagerness to make trouble around the world is due to its "hegemonic anxiety."

另外一篇由中国社科院的一位研究人员撰写的文章写道,由于“霸权焦虑症”,美国急切地想要煽风点火。

It is "to a large degree, a reflection of a twisted mentality of an empire moving downhill," according to the article.

文章写道,这“很大程度上是一个衰落中的帝国特有的心理扭曲在行为上的反映。”

The scholar also denounced the United States’ measures to contain China by causing trouble in East Asia.

这位学者还谴责了美国通过在东亚制造事端包围中国的措施。

A third article by Lin Hongyu, a professor at Huaqiao University, said U.S. maneuvers in the Asia-Pacific region are just part of its overseas expansion and interventionist diplomacy to maintain its leading international role.

第三篇文章由华侨大学教授林宏宇写道,他表示,美国在亚太地区的军事演习只是其海洋扩张和干预外交的一部分,目的是为了维持主导的国际地位。

The article called on Chinese authorities to manage disputes between China and the United States in a constructive way and to build a new type of major-country relationship together.

这篇文章呼吁中国政府以建设性的方式处理中美之间的争端,共同建立一种新型的大国关系。

Source: 编辑:David Yang (人民网) 双语
http://news.iyuba.com/m/essay/2016/09/19/49492.html

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Monday 18 June 2012

Drones, computers new weapons of US waging shadow wars!


 AP FILE - This Jan. 31, 2010 file photo shows an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, on a moon-lit night. After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile. Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
FILE - This Jan. 31, 2010 file photo shows an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, on a moon-lit night. After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile. Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint.  (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
Supporters of Pakistani religious party Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, burn a representation of a US flag during a rally condemning US drone strikes in tribal areas and the reopening of the NATO supply line to neighboring Afghanistan, in Hyderabad, Pakistan, Friday, June 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Pervez Masih)
FILE - This Jan. 31, 2010 file photo shows an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, on a moon-lit night. After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile. Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint.  (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
FILE - In this Sept. 7, 2011 file photo, John Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, speaks in Washington. After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile. Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) — AP
FILE - This Jan. 31, 2010 file photo shows an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, on a moon-lit night. After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile. Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint.  (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth, File)
— After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile.
Chart shows the number of air attacks in Pakistan — AP
Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm's way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint. 
It's war in the shadows, with the U.S. public largely in the dark. 

In Pakistan, armed drones, not U.S. ground troops or B-52 bombers, are hunting down al-Qaida terrorists, and a CIA-run raid of Osama bin Laden's hide-out was executed by a stealthy team of Navy SEALs. 

In Yemen, drones and several dozen U.S. military advisers are trying to help the government tip the balance against an al-Qaida offshoot that harbors hopes of one day attacking the U.S. homeland. 

In Somalia, the Horn of Africa country that has not had a fully functioning government since 1991, President Barack Obama secretly has authorized two drone strikes and two commando raids against terrorists. 

In Iran, surveillance drones have kept an eye on nuclear activities while a computer attack reportedly has infected its nuclear enrichment facilities with a virus, possibly delaying the day when the U.S. or Israel might feel compelled to drop real bombs on Iran and risk a wider war in the Middle East. 

The high-tech warfare allows Obama to target what the administration sees as the greatest threats to U.S. security, without the cost and liabilities of sending a swarm of ground troops to capture territory; some of them almost certainly would come home maimed or dead. 

But it also raises questions about accountability and the implications for international norms regarding the use of force outside of traditional armed conflict. The White House took an incremental step Friday toward greater openness about the basic dimensions of its shadowy wars by telling Congress for the first time that the U.S. military has been launching lethal attacks on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen. It did not mention drones, and its admission did not apply to CIA operations. 

"Congressional oversight of these operations appears to be cursory and insufficient," said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group. 

"It is Congress' responsibility to declare war under the Constitution, but instead it appears to have adopted a largely passive role while the executive takes the initiative in war fighting," Aftergood said in an interview. 

That's partly because lawmakers relinquished their authority by passing a law just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that essentially granted the White House open-ended authority for armed action against al-Qaida. 

Secret wars are not new. 

For decades, the CIA has carried out covert operations abroad at the president's direction and with congressional notice. It armed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who fought Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, for example. In recent years the U.S. military's secretive commando units have operated more widely, even in countries where the U.S. is not at war, and that's blurred the lines between the intelligence and military spheres. 

In this shroud of secrecy, leaks to the news media of classified details about certain covert operations have led to charges that the White House orchestrated the revelations to bolster Obama's national security credentials and thereby improve his re-election chances. The White House has denied the accusations. 

The leaks exposed details of U.S. computer virus attacks on Iran's nuclear program, the foiling of an al-Qaida bomb plot targeting U.S. aircraft, and other secret operations. 

Two U.S. attorneys are heading separate FBI investigations into leaks of national security information, and Congress is conducting its own probe. 

It's not just the news media that has pressed the administration for information about its shadowy wars. 

Some in Congress, particularly those lawmakers most skeptical of the need for U.S. foreign interventions, are objecting to the administration's drone wars. They are demanding a fuller explanation of how, for example, drone strikes are authorized and executed in cases in which the identity of the targeted terrorist is not confirmed. 

"Our drone campaigns already have virtually no transparency, accountability or oversight," Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and 25 other mostly anti-war members of Congress wrote Obama on Tuesday. 

A few dozen lawmakers are briefed on the CIA's covert action and clandestine military activity, and some may ask to review drone strike video and be granted access to after-action reports on strikes and other clandestine actions. But until two months ago, the administration had not formally confirmed in public its use of armed drones. 

In an April speech in Washington, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, acknowledged that despite presidential assurances of a judicious use of force against terrorists, some still question the legality of drone strikes. 

"So let me say it as simply as I can: Yes, in full accordance with the law - and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives - the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones," he said. 

President George W. Bush authorized drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere, but Obama has vastly increased the numbers. According to Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal, an online publication that tracks U.S. counterterrorism operations, the U.S. under Obama has carried out an estimated 254 drone strikes in Pakistan alone. That compares with 47 strikes during the Bush administration. 

In at least one case the target was an American. Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September. 

According to a White House list released late last year, U.S. counterterrorism operations have removed more than 30 terrorist leaders around the globe. They include al-Qaida in East Africa "planner" Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was killed in a helicopter strike in Somalia. 

The drone campaign is highly unpopular overseas. 

A Pew Research Center survey on the U.S. image abroad found that in 17 of 21 countries surveyed, more than half of the people disapproved of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders in such places as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. In the U.S., 62 percent approved of the drone campaign, making American public opinion the clear exception. 

The U.S. use of cyberweapons, like viruses that sabotage computer networks or other high-tech tools that can invade computers and steal data, is even more closely shielded by official secrecy and, arguably, less well understood. 

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been a leading critic of the administration's handling of information about using computers as a tool of war. 

"I think that cyberattacks are one of the greatest threats that we face," McCain said in a recent interview, "and we have a very divided and not very well-informed Congress addressing it." 

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and national security officials often talk publicly about improving U.S. defenses against cyberattack, not only on U.S. government computer systems but also against defense contractors and other private networks linked, for example, to the U.S. financial system or electrical grid. Left largely unexplained is the U.S. capacity to use computer viruses and other cyberweapons against foreign targets. 

In the view of some, the White House has cut Congress out of the loop, even in the realm of overt warfare. 

Sen. James Webb, D-Va., who saw combat in Vietnam as a Marine, introduced legislation last month that would require that the president seek congressional approval before committing U.S. forces in civil conflicts, such as last year's armed intervention in Libya, in which there is no imminent security threat to the U.S. 

"Year by year, skirmish by skirmish, the role of the Congress in determining where the U.S. military would operate, and when the awesome power of our weapon systems would be unleashed has diminished," Webb said.
By ROBERT BURNS, LOLITA C. BALDOR and KIMBERLY DOZIER, Associated Press
Online: Pew Research Center: www.pewresearch.org The Associated Press

Sunday 11 September 2011

Who is America’s new enemy?





America’s new enemy?

By ANDREW SIA star2@thestar.com.my

Chris Riddell 11 Sept 2011

 It used to be the Nazis, the Soviet Union and then Osama and al-Qaeda. Now that he is dead, who will become the new enemy America focuses its energies on?

 SO what now? With Osama bin Laden dead, will his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue a new wave of terrorism against the West?

Yet a report in British newspaper The Guardian in late July indicates that most Syrian activists reject the new al-Qaeda leader. Mohammad Al-Abdallah, the spokesman of local coordination committees in Syria, said: “Zawahiri is trying to convince the world that he has supporters in Syria, which will provoke international public opinion against us and give the regime the right to commit crimes against our people.”



For Tom Engelhardt, academic, author and editor of Tomdispatch.com, al-Qaeda was a ragtag crew that engaged in some dramatic terror acts over the past 10 years but, in reality, it had limited operational capabilities, while the movements it spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven “remarkably unimportant”. While Osama sat isolated in a Pakistan mansion, ironically, it was the Americans who did the work of creating war and chaos (and increasing people’s resentment of the United States) for Osama!

“Think of him as practising the Tao of Terrorism,” writes Engelhardt, comparing Osama to the way a tai chi master fights – not with his own minimal strength, but leveraging on his opponent’s strength, in this case, America’s massive fire power.

 
China rising: Will the United States next turn its attention to China?

And what can we hope for 10 years after 9/11?

Journalist Robert Fisk, writing in British newspaper The Independent, said, “Bin Laden told the world that he wanted to destroy the pro-Western regimes in the Arab world, the dictatorships of the Mubaraks and the Ben Alis. He wanted to create a new Islamic Caliphate. But these past few months, millions of Arab Muslims rose up and were prepared for their own martyrdom – not for Islam but for freedom and liberty and democracy. Bin Laden didn’t get rid of the tyrants. The people did. And they didn’t want a caliph.”

Jason Burke, author of The 9/11 Wars, notes that back in 2004, American intelligence agencies had foreseen “continued dominance” for many years to come. But in 2008, they judged that within a few decades the US would no longer be able to “call the shots”.

“If the years from 2004 to 2008 brought victory, then America and the West cannot afford many more victories like it,” he adds.

But in this second decade of the 21st century, will America learn the lessons of history?

Two years ago, when President Barack Obama intoned general platitudes about human rights for the Middle East in his landmark Cairo speech, his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, had this to say about the Egyptian dictator: “I consider President and Mrs Mubarak to be friends of my family.”

As the comedian and talk show host Jay Leno once joked, the invasion of Iraq was initially supposed to be called Operation Iraqi Liberation, until they realised that it spelt O.I.L. – and the name was then changed to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Haroon Siddiqui, a columnist at the Toronto Star, believes that Obama has reverted to Washington’s old double standard of one law for allies, another for adversaries. And so dissidents in Iran and Syria will be cheered on and materially backed to overthrow their regimes but not the people rising up in Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Uri Avnery, a former Israeli Member of Parliament and author of several books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflects that the American empire always needs an antagonist, an “evil, worldwide enemy” to focus its energies on, be it the Nazis or the Soviet Union.

“The disappearance of the communist threat left a gaping void in the American psyche, which cried out to be filled. Osama bin Laden kindly offered his services as a new global enemy.

“Overnight, medieval anti-Islamic prejudices are dusted-off for display. Islam the murderous, the fanatical, the anti-freedom, anti-all-our-values. Suicide bombers, 72 virgins, jihad,” he writes in the online “political newsletter”, Counterpunch. Avnery adds that the present Islamophobia hysteria is similar to how Europeans used to demonise Jews in the past.

American civil rights lawyer, columnist and author Glenn Greenwald predicts in online news and culture website salon.com that even though US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has acknowledged that al-Qaeda has a grand total of “fewer than two dozen key operatives” on the entire planet, the War on Terror will be continued by trotting out more “fear-mongering propaganda” against a new alliance of villains from Somalia and Yemen – the “scariest since Marvel Comic’s Masters of Evil”.

As the future unfolds, will other villains be found to replace Osama? How about China?

John Feffer, the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus (a project of the Washington DC-based Institute for Policy Studies), notes that perhaps the only country in the world that has benefited from the War on Terror is China.

“Beijing has watched the United States spend more than US$3tril (RM9tril) on the war on terrorism, devote its military resources to the Middle East, and neglect pretty much every other part of the globe. The United States is now mired in debt, stuck in a recession, and paralysed by partisan politics. Over that same period, meanwhile, China has quickly become the second largest economy in the world.”

What a difference a decade makes. When US President George W. Bush came into office over 10 years ago, he called Beijing a “strategic competitor” rather than a strategic partner. When a US spy plane flying off Hainan Island was involved in an accident with a Chinese plane, the Americans refused to apologise.

Ten years later, after US government debt was downgraded, we see China’s official Xinhua news agency lecturing the Americans – in English, mind you – that “the days when debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appear to be numbered.”

In a Time magazine article in April, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned that “the single biggest threat to our national security is our debt”.

While America is still building aircraft carriers at US$15bil (RM45bil) a pop, China is developing missiles expressly designed to sink them – at a cost of US$10mil (RM30mil) each. Talk about being cost efficient. Economix, a unit of the New York Times, reveals that the US accounts for 43% of all the military spending on Earth – six times as much as China, which accounts for 7.3% of world military spending: “We’ve waged war nonstop for nearly a decade in Afghanistan against a foe with no army, no navy and no air force. We send US$1bil (RM3.02bil) destroyers to handle five Somali pirates in a fibreglass skiff.”

Yet the irony is: “(The US is) borrowing cash from China to pay for weapons that we would presumably use against it. If the Chinese want to slay us, they don’t need to attack us with their missiles. They just have to call in their loans.”

If Time’s scenario ever comes to pass, then the war on terror would be ended by Chinese financial tai chi.

Saturday 10 September 2011

9/11 American Innocence: What Really Happened to Us?





Frederick E. Allen Frederick E. Allen, Forbes Staff

September 11 and American Innocence: What Really Happened to Us?

U.S. Kills Bin Laden Evil expunged—but have we fully recovered? Image by swanksalot via Flickr

The other day at the Republican debate, Jon Huntsman said “I think we have had our innocence shattered” by what happened on September 11, 2001. On Morning Joe the journalist Tina Brown called the date “the last moment of American innocence,” and Mike Barnicle described it as “the end of our metaphorical summer as a country.”

Really? It seems as if every time disaster strikes our nation we hear that it’s the end of our innocence, but in truth there has never been an innocent time in the land of the Salem witch trials and the Boston Massacre and John Brown’s raid and our murderous Civil War and . . . well, the list goes on, right up through—not long before September 11—Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment of a president.

In fact, I’d say that if anything the opposite may be true, that a big price of September 11, beyond the lives lost, was that it may have given us a new birth of innocence, or perhaps of destructive pseudo-innocence.

17 images Gallery: 16 Ways 9/11 Changed The Way We Do Business 

Of course we were completely blameless in the hideous tragedy that befell us. We were entirely innocent in that sense of the word. When the planes struck that morning, the U.S. was, and knew it was, a beacon of freedom. We also were a prosperous land where unfettered innovativeness had by and large made every generation richer than the last. We had shown that we could achieve more than anyone else even while balancing our budgets and cutting our deficits. We felt freer, tougher, stronger, and more resilient than anybody. Then we were attacked by an enemy that was as purely evil as an enemy can be. We had done nothing to deserve the horror visited on us. We were plainly guiltless in an attack that was plainly evil. Only the most extreme, reflexive guilt-seekers could possibly find any American transgression that could begin to rationalize the attacks.



Knowing ourselves as a shining force for good and as blameless victims in what happened on September 11, maybe we let it all go to our heads a little bit. A kind of national naivete seems to have swept over us, an innocence about the consequences of our actions. President Bush told us that we were now at war, but also that we would have to make no personal sacrifices. He launched two foreign wars with no tax increases to pay for them. After the start of one of those wars went well, he appeared, in a burst of overconfidence, on an aircraft carrier under a giant banner reading MISSION ACCOMPLISHED to announce that “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Then as that battle continued, we even forgot that as a nation we had always held torture to be un-American and morally unjustifiable.

As our two new wars began to spin out of control we not only didn’t pay for them but also gave ourselves massive tax cuts and a big new unfunded Medicare entitlement at the same time. Too many of us kept buying bigger and bigger houses, and second homes, while borrowing all the money to do so, secure in our understanding that for Americans life keeps getting better and we all get richer. We cooked up reckless schemes to multiply the wealth from those homes. In other words, we appear to have forgotten, in the long shadow of September 11, that no big thing in life is easy or simple, and nothing comes without a price.

We finally began to see the price we were paying later in the decade, when the wars we had started refused to end, and the housing market crashed and bankrupted millions of Americans, and Wall Street imploded, and the economy went into its worst tailspin since the Great Depression. Finally our new age of innocence ended.

Or did it? In 2008 we rejected all our misdeeds of the previous years by voting for “hope” and “change” and giving ourselves a president who seemed to believe that any problem could be solved if everybody just agreed to be reasonable and get along. Then in 2010 we turned against that choice by electing a Congress dominated by people who seemed to believe that any problem could be solved by lowering taxes and shrinking government, period. If we had been naive through the decade of the 2000s, our naivete lived on, and it continued to get us into trouble.

If that all means that in some sense Osama Bin Laden provoked the U.S. into self-destructiveness, then in that sense he won the struggle he began on September 11. Yet the fact is that he has lost it. His poisonous cause has withered and died. The Arab world has turned definitively against him in the Arab Spring, as the rest of the world turned against him long before.

As for our own naivete, if that is what it was, maybe it is beginning to lift now, too. On September 8, 2011, that ineffectually conciliating president gave a speech presenting a raft of actions to address the ongoing jobs crisis—policies that had all won bipartisan support in the past—in which he repeatedly demanded that Congress “pass this jobs plan right away” and bluntly told the legislators to “stop the political circus.” And the leader of his opposition, the previously unyielding speaker of the House, actually said, “The proposals the president outlined tonight merit consideration.”

Might we finally be approaching the end of an age of innocence now?

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