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  • She Sits in a Room that is Dark

    She sits in a room that is dark. There are no lights, there is no gas or oil. There is no heat, there is no electricity. Those were rare luxuries even before the bombs fell because she is in prison. A place of blockades cut off from the rest of the world for over a year. But now there is no heat at all, and it is freezing cold at night. And, more importantly, she must keep all the windows open for if not they will all shatter from the vibrations of buildings exploding nearby and the glass will explode onto her children.

    So she huddles with her children under ten blankets. The children cannot drink milk nor find any meat because she cannot afford these luxuries. She was brought up by a Sufi sheikh, and she was taught so many

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  • PRAGMATIC AND PROGRESSIVE: TWO WORDS FOR THE NEW AMERICAN ERA

    Barack Obama, my new president, has ushered in a new era of American history, on many levels. But we are quickly moving to the question of how President Obama’s leadership and governance will operate, what will it look like in practice. Everyone is looking for clues, and Dan Balz has an excellent article on deciphering those hints of the future, based on Tom Mann’s insights at the Brookings Institution.

    His voting record and the platform upon which he ran certainly suggest that his beliefs put him left of center. But Obama allies point to his pledge to govern inclusively as a counter to those who say his real purpose is to drive through the liberals’ agenda.

    “He is genuinely a progressive, but he’s not an ideologue,” argued Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution. “He’s a broadly pragmatic person who, when confronted with new situations, is prepared to take a new

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  • I MET JIM CROW AND SENATOR OBAMA IS LAYING HIM TO REST

    I was phoning somewhere in the American South for Obama the other day. What an education for me! There were simple, poor families that have been energized by the campaign, volunteering, excited. There were some angry independents, a completely nuts Nader person who hung up on me after screaming about women getting 93 cents on the dollar.

    And then there was “Jim Crow” himself, who I have always longed to meet. When I say “Jim Crow” I mean those people in the United States who have actively supported racial segregation their whole lives. They actively ensured through legislation in the late nineteenth century, referred to as the “Jim Crow Laws”, that blacks would remain segregated and unequal in the United States, in a steady reversal of the gains made by victory in the Civil War over slavery. The great President Woodrow Wilson was actually the first Southern Democrat to …

  • HOLDING TOGETHER COMMUNITY IN TIMES OF DISASTER: WHITHER AMERICA

    Is America learning from its disasters how to hold people together in community, how to prevent and manage conflict? It is not clear that anything will be learned from the current direction of leadership. The level of corruption from the Republican administration has been astonishing, and can only guarantee that people will be at each other’s throats. This is not how to prevent conflict and build community. Here is this note of concern on FEMA’s response to Ike:

    With hurricanes Gustav and Ike slamming ashore, focus again turns to FEMA’s performance, and we continue to be less than inspired. After Gustav, the agency admitted that it underestimated how much food and water and other goods that Louisiana would need. It promised the people of Houston ice and water in the immediate aftermath of Ike. It turns out that the Salvation Army had hot meals going and a local radio station

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  • A New Direction for US-Muslim Relations

    Yesterday Marc participated in panels on Capitol Hill and at  The National Press Club to coincide with the release of a seminal report entitled “Changing Course: A New Direction for Relations with the Muslim World” issued by The US-Muslim Engagement Project. Marc was one of thirty four Americans who constituted the Leadership Council on U.S. Muslim Engagement. It was a bipartisan group of leading Republicans, Democrats, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, secular and religious, liberal and conservative. They met over a period of two years to create this report which has detailed recommendations for the United States Government, NGO’s, and for the governments of the Muslim world. The convening this extremely diverse group was also meant as a model of how to change course and what kind of negotiations need to take place in the United States in order to create positive change, as well as in the global …

  • McCain’s Temper and Global Conflict

    I have been uneasy for eight years with the trend in American politics of anointing men with tempers. This is not safe in terms of global conflict. I think of the incredible pressures of the White House, and the reality of having the ability to destroy the earth many times over. I think of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how we might have all died when I was six years old if John and Bobby Kennedy had uncontrollable tempers. I opposed John Silber and Howard Dean, two Democrats, for president because of their tempers, which I personally witnessed. In conflict, character is everything, far more important than strategy, though strategy matters. More will emerge in the future about anger and George Bush, and about the conduct of the war, but in many ways that is history now. What matters now is whether Americans make a wise decision about their future.…

  • Latest American Strategies on the Georgian-Russian Conflict

    David Ignatius has a sympathetic read on American involvement in Georgia’s decision to attack South Ossetia. Is he right? Not sure. He seems to believe that Georgia’s behavior was not based on American prodding, and that, on the contrary, the Administration was telling him to keep the brakes on. David is an astute, centrist observer with an intelligence background. The problem now is one of radical distrust by any of our allies of a Republican Administration. David writes:

    The signal Bush is said to be sending Saakashvili is: “We’re with you. We take your survival and interests seriously. But be smart. Don’t give Russia a pretext.” This go-slow message is in part a reflection of the administration’s frustration that Saakashvili ignored repeated advice over the past two years not to provoke Russia over the disputed regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

    Having promised Moscow that the United States would restrain

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