Posted on 04/09/2009 1:52:23 PM PDT by seanmerc
WASHINGTON -- Words count, as President Barack Obama once said. Words spoken truthfully count even more.
The president's triumphal eight-day six-country overseas tour, ending with his emotional visit to U.S. troops in Iraq, will go down in history as an opportunity for us to collect Obama's words and save them in our computers so we can match them with the administration's future actions.
It's refreshing to hear words of optimism, courage and determination aimed at solving long-standing problems and threats. As the president said in Turkey, "If we don't reach high, then we don't make progress."
So let's firmly assign Obama's rhetoric during his tour to the "good news" category and hope that his future policies align with those words.
Here are some Obama words that registered with me:
In Prague, Obama told a welcoming audience of 20,000 Czechs that he would convene an international summit in Washington to shrink the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Earlier, in London, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed to conclude a new treaty that would reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals below the 1,700-2,000 deployed warheads agreed to in 2002.
In Turkey, he reached out to the Muslim community, toured a 400-year-old mosque and told a group of university students to "build new bridges instead of new walls" throughout the world. The word "bridge" is full of extra meaning in Turkey, which considers itself a bridge between Europe and Asia.
I liked the way he boldly boasted about his own Muslim roots (his paternal grandfather was Muslim; the president considers himself Christian.) After being introduced as "Barack Hussein Obama," he told the Turkish parliament that the United States "has been enriched by Muslim-Americans. Many other Americans have Muslims in their family or have lived in a Muslim-majority country. I know, because I am one of them."
He also drew applause when he said, "The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam."
Obama said he wants a constructive relationship with Iran. Three cheers for that, given the bristling cold-shoulder that previous U.S. presidents have given the Islamic Republic. We know how well that's worked.
During his brief visit in Iraq, Obama told U.S. troops that their mission had "given Iraq the opportunity to stand on its own as a democratic country." The president said: "It is time for us to transfer to the Iraqis. They need to take responsibility for their country." Message to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki: The U.S. is getting out; you better get your act together. The administration's goal is have all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011.
It was refreshing to hear him say, as he told the Turkish students, that he had opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He wasn't trying to fuzz up his anti-war stance, now that he is commander in chief, though he tempered that view with a realistic qualification that he didn't want to have U.S. troops depart Iraq in a timeframe that would "see a complete collapse into violence."
He again endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, as part of the two-state solution to the Middle East crisis. Obama's comments take on extra significance because the new government in Israel is hostile to that goal. Obama's speeches abroad have given America a new and gentler image. That profile had only one way to go – up -- after the eight years of the Bush imperial presidency, which alienated many traditional U.S. allies because of Bush's doctrines of pre-emptive war and torture.
Obama's first business in the foreign affairs arena should be to create an atmosphere of trust after the American people have been misled for so long. He can go a long way toward achieving this goal if he puts action behind some of his promising rhetoric.
I'll go quietly...
Got you excited, huh? LOL
I’m blind!
BTTT LOL
I said woman, not crone.
"If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed," Obama said.
Now what did that poor pooch ever do to you?
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