Matthew Bell has a nice piece on TW today on the foreign policy issues confronting the president-elect. Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace tells him the global economic crisis has to top the list but others make it clear Afghanistan also looms large.  Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a news conference today that the most pressing issue there is stopping the civilian casualties that result from U.S. airstrikes. He asked Obama to make ending them a priority. Centcom Commander General David Petraeus was in Kabul today and no doubt hearing the same message. 

 

End of the Civil War

Thomas Friedman declares the Civil War over in his column today.   It’s worth a read. I grappled with some of the same history in a recent radio piece about the Civil War and its aftermath for a series of stories about how wars end. It’s rare that the issues a war is fought over are resolved with its (military) end.

huddled around radios

Here’s the sentence of the Obama speech that got talked about at our news meeting this morning:

“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

Thanks to UN Dispatch for isolating the quote.

Obama

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