“We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.”
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Clinton responded that one problem is that some human rights standards are “so foreign to other cultures.”
“If you’re someone, as I am, who believes strongly in the empowerment of women … in a lot of places, it’s just not understood,” she said.
“Of course, we take good care of our women,” Clinton told the audience, impersonating one of those foreign leaders. “We don’t let them out of the house, so that they never get into trouble. We don’t let them drive cars, so that they can never be taken advantage of. So we are protecting the human rights of our women.”
“You can imagine the conversations that I have,” she said.
In parts of Africa and Asia, she said, gay rights is “just a totally foreign concept.”
“I mean, the first response is, ‘We don’t have any of those here,’” she said, to laughter. “Second response is, ‘If we did, we would not want to have them and would want to get rid of them as quickly as possible. And it’s your problem, United States of America, that you have so many of those people. So don’t come here and tell us to protect the rights of people we don’t have or that we don’t want.’”
“It’s a very difficult conversation because it’s just not been one that people have had up until now,” she said.
”The BBC’s new documentary, “The Power of Nightmares”, presents evidence that al Qaeda does not exist, and was created by United States Central Intelligence Agents. Among the evidence presented, they call into question the testimony of Jamal al-Fadl, point to staged footage of bin Laden’s ‘foot-troops’, and the faked Tora Bora headquarters that Donald Rumsfeld insisted was one of many.
There are militarized Islamic terrorists, but they aren’t a unified or monolithic front.
Simply Evil: A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida.
Hitchens’ most recent article from Slate on the Topic of Al Qaida, terrorism, and the response of the last 10 years.
Inside Colin Powell’s Decision to Declare Genocide in Darfur
In September 2004, then-U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, became the first member of any U.S.administration to apply the label “genocide” to an ongoing conflict. Interviews I conducted for Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide revealed that despite a thorough investigation into the atrocities in Sudan’s western region of Darfur, the legal advice given to Powell was that the resulting evidence (on which he based his genocide determination) was inconclusive. Now a newly declassified State Department memorandum sheds further light on why Powell nonetheless decided to label the situation in Darfur genocide.
Read more of Rebecca Hamilton’s excellent report in The Atlantic
The top 100 foreign policy twitter feeds — disappointingly, few East Asia/Oceania figures.
Obama to announce Afghan plans Wednesday - The Washington Post
President Obama is in the final phase of determining how many U.S. troops he will withdraw from Afghanistan next month and plans to announce his decision Wednesday, administration officials said.
![“[H]e [Mitt Romney] said, only the Afghanis can decide their political future. That’s a concept, I think, everyone would agree with. The problem is, the people are not called Afghanis. They’re called Afghans. So if you’re trying to talk about what the foreign policy should be for a foreign nation… you should know what the people are called.” - Richard Engel, Meet the Press - Watch](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln3tc0JDEJ1qz80pso1_1280.jpg)
“[H]e [Mitt Romney] said, only the Afghanis can decide their political future. That’s a concept, I think, everyone would agree with. The problem is, the people are not called Afghanis. They’re called Afghans. So if you’re trying to talk about what the foreign policy should be for a foreign nation… you should know what the people are called.” - Richard Engel, Meet the Press - Watch
“The faux defenders of Israel always look ridiculous in the rear view mirror. Their fear of the words “Palestinian state” has been proven ridiculous. And their lies—their lies about what President Obama has said about Israel‘s future borders and their personal distrust of Barack Obama as an ally of Israel is a disgrace to their cause.”
“It was taken as a red flag by Netanyahu and what happened then was that even if this was implicit in things that previous Presidents had said, Netanyahu seized on it even before he got on the plane – he criticized the President. And in such a fashion, he lectured him in the Oval Office… . It was a stone-faced Barack Obama and Netanyahu basically treating him like a school-boy.”
President Obama’s speech at AIPAC’s Policy Conference - May 22, 2011
“The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on U.S. power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance.”
Working Towards Middle East Peace
President Barack Obama walks with, from left, President Hosni Mubarek of Egypt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, and King Abdullah II of Jordan, through the Cross Hall of the White House, Sept. 1, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)
U.S. Is Said to Assure Israel a Nuclear Iran Isn’t Imminent
The Obama administration, citing evidence of continued troubles inside Iran’s nuclear program, has persuaded Israel that it would take roughly a year — and perhaps longer — for Iran to complete what one senior official called a “dash” for a nuclear weapon, according to American officials.
White House officials said they believe the assessment has dimmed the prospect that Israel would pre-emptively strike against the country’s nuclear facilities within the next year, as Israeli officials have suggested in thinly veiled threats.
continue reading… NYTimes
“People around the world today view the United States more positively than at any time since the second Iraq war,” said Doug Miller, chairman of international polling firm GlobeScan, which carried out the poll with the Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa) at the University of Maryland.
“While still well below that of countries like Germany and the UK, the global standing of the US is clearly on the rise again.”
