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Welcome to My World, Barack - SecState Rice Interview
On Jan. 20, Barack Obama will inherit a world very different from the one his predecessor found in January 2001. Over the past eight years, the Bush administration has faced great challenges and nurtured grand ambitions; it has tried hard to remake the world. Condoleezza Rice has been a central player in that effort since becoming the candidate Bush’s chief foreign-policy adviser in 2000, so we arranged to interview her at the State Department late last month. The interview turned into a wide-ranging discussion of where this government has taken the United States and what sort of world it will leave for the next president. The editors have culled the highlights of her remarks in the text that follows. We also spoke with other administration foreign-policy makers — Christopher Hill and Daniel Fried of the State Department and Gen. James L. Jones, former supreme allied commander, Europe — whose remarks supplement and illuminate those of Rice.
An interesting read.
Richard's $.02 
Welcome to My World, Barack
Interviews by HELENE COOPER and SCOTT L. MALCOMSON
November 16, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/ma...gewanted=print
Excerpt:
WHY WE MAY BE LOSING IN AFGHANISTAN.
I think the first thing the next president will have to do is understand that Afghanistan is now part of a regional problem. Maybe four or five years ago it was about Afghanistan, but now it’s about Afghanistan and Pakistan, and you can’t deal with one without dealing with the other. So there is a regional aspect to this that I think we have to deal with. Secondly, I think it’s important for people to understand that Afghanistan is an international problem. It’s not a U.S. problem alone, as opposed to Iraq. . . . The U.N. is there; NATO is there; the E.U. is there; the World Bank is there; all the N.G.O.’s in the world; around 50 countries. So the question is with all of this capability there, why do we have the sense that we’re backsliding? The top of my list is the drugs and narcotics, which are, without question, the economic engine that fuels the resurgent Taliban, and the crime and corruption in the country. . . . We couldn’t even talk about that in 2006 when I was there. That was not a topic that anybody wanted to talk about, including the U.S. JAMES L. JONES Gen. James L. Jones has served as commandant of the Marine Corps, supreme allied commander in Europe and head of the U.S. military’s European Command. He was named a special envoy for Middle East security last year by Condoleezza Rice.
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“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.” - To Kill A Mockingbird (Atticus Finch)
“Almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.” - Robert Heinlein
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