Real Hope and Change

"Where you have na tions that are oppressing their people, isn't there an international responsibility to intervene? I think the need for intervention becomes a moral imperative. . .

"There are going to be objections to just about any decision, because there are some in the international community who believe that state sovereignty is sacrosanct. . .

"But we also say we're not going to just wait indefinitely and allow for the development of a nuclear weapon, the breach of international treaties, and wake up one day and find ourselves in a much worse position and unable to act."

So, what happened to the non-meddling (except in Central America) foreign policy stance? Don’t get us wrong, we are certainly more agreeable to this hawkish, neo-con approach to foreign policy than the wait, wait, wait….. wait and see response we got with respect to Iran.

Is there a fundamental shift at work here or do we have a differing set of standards depending on the location on the globe?

Ralph Peters, no fan of Obama he, says the President’s speech was the finest on Africa made by an American President.

Yet there's hope. Obama's latest adore-me tour began badly, but ended on a powerful positive note. Following the debacle in Moscow and disappointment in Italy (where the G8 proved resistant to charisma), the president made a wise, useful and praiseworthy stop in Ghana...

It was a great speech (he should give a variant of it to several of our own domestic constituencies). I could not have been prouder of our president.

Read more, here.