Squashing Entrenched Pygmies TakesTime!

Dickerson makes some valid points. Attacking and being on target is fine but just as GW can't be blamed for all the world's ills neither should Obama.

When I hear McCain use the "I" word too much I get nauseous. I know how to fix the economy, I know how to reduce the price of oil. I know how to defeat terrorism I know, I know, I know. McCain we are not electing The Lone Ranger!

Our problems are not going to be fixed by the "I knows." They could be fixed by intellectually honest leadership that can get Congress to quit spending, quit being partisan, doing what is right and in the nation's best interest and then bringing the public on board. That is what I know!

And I also know that is a tall and very difficult order because Congress is run by two partisan Democrat fools from safe districts who are therefore, immune, for the moment but so was Pelosi's sandy haired Democrat predecessor - Gephardt. Just takes a bit longer sometimes to squash entrenched pygmies. Tax payers could also save billions if they sent Chuck Schumer back to New York to sit on a park bench with former Gov. Spitzer. (See 1 and 2 below.)

Blankley, Newt's buddy, sizes up Obama and suggests the would be emperor is quite sartorial but might not be tailor made for the job! (See 3 below.)

Glassman is correct when he cites Sec. Gates comment about 'not being able to capture or kill our way to victory.' However, as I have always stated, through the concerted and intelligent use of effective power you can put your adversary on his knees and thereby, give him a somewhat different view of his prospects!

So it was with the "surge." The surge demonstrated our continued commitment til we got it right, which forced dispirited our adversaries to take another reading of their prospects and then they decided it was time to fold! Even losers eventually see the sense in not losing further.


Thus, diplomacy without force behind it and a willingness to use that force leads to empty rhetoric, a wearing down process of endless negotiations, followed by eventual appeasement borne out of frustration - read IRAN!(See 4 below.)

Teddy Roosevelt on immigration and being an American. Boy have we drifted and proves my old adage - when all else fails, lower your standards (See 5 below.)



Dick

1) McCain's Unhappy Warrior Sloppy attacks are not the path to victory.
By John Dickerson


John McCain attacked Barack Obama both at home and abroad this week. One attack was smart. One wasn't. On Iraq, McCain pressed Obama over his opposition to the troop surge—the strategy that has reduced violence in Iraq and led to modest political gains for the al-Maliki government. This was smart. The topic is on McCain's issue turf, potentially puts his opponent at odds with the American generals who executed the surge, and makes Obama look like a hidebound pol who won't absorb new facts that contradict his predetermined conclusions. McCain's dumb attack came in a television ad that blamed Barack Obama for high oil prices. You might have thought the cause of the oil-price hike was war, SUVs, OPEC, speculation, and global demand for oil. Nope—it's Obama. By this standard, he should also answer for the Starbucks closings and the dent in my Honda.

McCain is attacking too much and indiscriminately. The barrage undermines his brand, takes time away from telling voters what he might do for them, and looks awfully old-timey in a year when voters want a new brand. He should go on the offensive, yes, but in targeted forays.

There is a debate in Republican politics—and inside the McCain campaign—about what's plaguing the GOP contender. A central question is just how much time McCain should spend attacking his opponent. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru in the National Review argue that he needs to get more aggressive in raising doubts about Obama, whose advantages put him in a position, they fear, to run away with the race. Other longtime McCain allies argue for an almost opposite approach. One suggested McCain ignore Obama for a month so that McCain can spend time explaining to voters where he'd like to take the country.

Perhaps McCain could go after Obama more often and more vehemently, as the goaders would have it, if he were better at it. But most of the time he's not. When he's angry, he can be withering, but that's usually in private. Plus, he's not angry that often. When he attacks Obama on tax cuts or energy, he sounds as if he's phoning it in. Voters get nothing to grab onto or legitimately fear. For McCain, who likes to have fun campaigning, the negativity doesn't look as if it's all that fun.

When McCain is drawing contrasts with Obama on the surge or foreign policy, by contrast, he sounds as if he believes it. He starts to approximate the happy warrior his advocates gush about. A debate over the surge also has potential to play well for McCain because it targets Obama's vulnerabilities while highlighting McCain's strongest selling point. McCain is running on his personal story of physical and political sacrifice. His support for the surge is a pretty good proxy for that message of putting country first. It was an unpopular stand, and he stood by it. Obama is weak on the surge because it has worked better than he predicted it would, which is why his campaign cleaned up his past comments from his Web site. This gives McCain an opening to talk about Obama's judgment.

But if McCain is going to make his surge argument stick, voters need to trust him. His "straight talk" reputation will have to be as sturdy as possible. The gas-prices ad—and the equally disingenuous one on tax cuts—dismantles that reputation. In 2000, McCain said that spinning is lying. By that standard, these claims are what? Double-lying. Super lying?

Despite what editorial writers say, voters generally don't mind attack ads that much, particularly on the subject of oil exploration, which is politically popular. But McCain is a special case. He has less room to exaggerate claims about Obama's tax plans or to invent Obama's culpability for high gas prices, because he calls himself a straight talker. Obama has the same problem, of course. He's not the straight talker he claims to be, either. Beyond his policy reversals on FISA and campaign funding, his campaign also engages in the garden-variety shuffle. Most recently, aides tripped up during Obama's foreign trip when they tried to claim that his speech in Berlin was not a political event—never mind that a campaign ad crew would be there. But while Obama may be offering a sort-of version of old-style politics, McCain, in his fumbled attacks, displays the genuine article. In a year during which voters want change, he's offering examples of what they want change from.

McCain's wild pitches also take time away from addressing the main complaint about his campaign, which is that he lacks a story to tell. In 2000, it was easy for voters to figure out what John McCain had to offer them. He was a reformer. At town halls, he would answer almost every question by talking about the corruption in the campaign-finance system. For an undisciplined politician, he was relentlessly on message because he had the message in his gut. Even if people weren't listening to the specifics about soft money and lobbyists, his general claim to challenging the system and the entrenched interests seemed sincere.

Now it's Obama who benefits from this phenomenon. It's harder to know what McCain stands for. He's for the surge and remedying global warming, yes, and for allowing states to drill for oil off the country's coastlines. But those are data points, not an arc. The criticism I hear from inside and outside the campaign is that McCain lacks a line that tells people where he's going to take them if he's president.

McCain's aides insist that the senator often talks at length without mentioning his opponent, and they blame the press for covering only the negative comments. As the latest sign of their frustration with the media, the McCain campaign released a video titled "Obama Love" delineating the press infatuation with Obama. This perceived tilt in coverage inevitably goads the McCain staffers to go after Obama more. As one top aide put it, since they don't believe the press is pressing the Democratic nominee the way it should, the campaign has to do the press corps' job for it. Maybe. But if McCain staffers are doing our job, given the claims in McCain's latest ad, they've adopted Weekly World News' standards.

2) The GQ Statesman
By Tony Blankley

Watching Obama glide through his foreign trip so far, nervous Republicans and other patriots have to hope that American voters will not view Obama through the eyes of a Hollywood casting director. That's because one could not cast a man who visually can portray a worldly statesman better. We all must envy his ability to effortlessly drape his tall, imperially slender form in gilded Louis XV chairs in foreign palaces. Mixing just the right combination of worldly bonhomie and serious mien, his presentation (conveniently presented to the world with video but no audio) make, by comparison, Henry Kissinger, FDR and Winston Churchill all look like clumsy provincial oafs.

And he tops it all off with making what looked like a 40-foot 3-pointer in a military basketball court, surrounded by positively disposed American troops. Of course, we don't know how many times he had to try the shot before making it once. As NBC's veteran foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell -- in an act of admirable candor -- said Monday: "Let me just say something about the message management. He didn't have reporters with him; he didn't have a press pool; he didn't do a press conference while he was on the ground in either Afghanistan or Iraq. What you're seeing is not reporters brought in. You're seeing selected pictures taken by the military, questions by the military, and what some would call fake interviews because they're not interviews from a journalist. So there's a real press issue here. Politically it's smart as can be. But we've not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before."

When he does submit himself to the occasional press interview, his actual words read in print must make his handlers as nervous as his visual images make Republicans nervous. His discussion of his Iraq policy is almost incomprehensible. He has claimed that both Bush and Iraq's al-Maliki have come to his position that it is time to move our troops out of Iraq.

But back on Sept. 12, 2007, he called for an immediate start to the withdrawal of all U.S. combat forces from Iraq. Obama's plan called for the complete pullout of troops by the end of 2008 by bringing home one or two brigades each month.

"Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq. There never was," he said. "'The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq's leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year -- now."

For him, now that the surge he opposed is working and victory may be around the corner, to claim that he was always right is like someone in America in 1944 opposed to the Allied D-Day invasion of Normandy claiming there is no military solution to World War II and we should bring our troops home; then once our troops were on the beach, warning that our troops can accomplish nothing on the beaches -- get them out; then when they broke out, warning Americans that they never will get through the hedgerows; then when they broke through the hedgerows, warning that they never will get through the Siegfried line; then the following spring, when Hitler blew his brains out, Germany surrendered and President Truman ordered our troops to be brought home systematically, bragging: "You see? I was always right. Even the president now agrees it is time to bring the troops home."

But if that claim is brazen, his discussion of Iraq and the war on terror is surprisingly simplistic. When asked by ABC News whether he is committed to winning the war in Iraq, Obama said: "I don't think we have any choice. We have to win the broader war against terror that threatens America and its interests. I think that Iraq is one front on that war, but I think the central front is in Afghanistan and in the border regions of Pakistan."
(So is he or is he not in favor of winning in Iraq?)

But his idea that the central front of the war on terror is in some geographic location is simplistic. The central front is in the minds of Muslims around the world. If we lose Iraq and Islamist radicals are seen to win, we lose a strategic battle in the war -- just as in the Cold War the strategic front was not in Greece in 1947 or Berlin in 1948 or China in 1949 or Korea in 1950 or Cuba in 1962 or Vietnam in 1965 or in Eurocommunist countries in the 1970s. The central front was always the minds of men. When the idea of Soviet-style communism was defeated by Reagan, the war ended. When virtually all Muslims see terror to be a dead end to their aspirations, the war on terror will be over.

When Obama understands that, he may be ready to be deputy assistant secretary of state.

3) OPINION:The Fannie Mae Gang
By PAUL A. GIGOT

Angelo Mozilo was in one of his Napoleonic moods. It was October 2003, and the CEO of Countrywide Financial was berating me for The Wall Street Journal's editorials raising doubts about the accounting of Fannie Mae. I had just been introduced to him by Franklin Raines, then the CEO of Fannie, whom I had run into by chance at a reception hosted by the Business Council, the CEO group that had invited me to moderate a couple of panels.

Mr. Mozilo loudly declared that I didn't know what I was talking about, that I didn't understand accounting or the mortgage markets, and that I was in the pocket of Fannie's competitors, among other insults. Mr. Raines, always smoother than Mr. Mozilo, politely intervened to avoid an extended argument, and Countrywide's bantam rooster strutted off.


I've thought about that episode more than once recently amid the meltdown and government rescue of Fannie and its sibling, Freddie Mac. Trying to defend the mortgage giants, Paul Krugman of the New York Times recently wrote, "What you need to know here is that the right -- the WSJ editorial page, Heritage, etc. -- hates, hates, hates Fannie and Freddie. Why? Because they don't want quasi-public entities competing with Angelo Mozilo."

That's a howler even by Mr. Krugman's standards. Fannie Mae and Mr. Mozilo weren't competitors; they were partners. Fannie helped to make Countrywide as profitable as it once was by buying its mortgages in bulk. Mr. Raines -- following predecessor Jim Johnson -- and Mr. Mozilo made each other rich. Which explains why Mr. Johnson could feel so comfortable asking Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) to discuss a sweetheart mortgage with Mr. Mozilo, and also explains the Mozilo-Raines tag team in 2003.

FANNIE MAYHEM: A HISTORY

Click here for a compendium of The Wall Street Journal's recent editorial coverage of Fannie and Freddie.

I recount all this now because it illustrates the perverse nature of Fannie and Freddie that has made them such a relentless and untouchable political force. Their unique clout derives from a combination of liberal ideology and private profit. Fannie has been able to purchase political immunity for decades by disguising its vast profit-making machine in the cloak of "affordable housing." To be more precise, Fan and Fred have been protected by an alliance of Capitol Hill and Wall Street, of Barney Frank and Angelo Mozilo.

I know this because for more than six years I've been one of their antagonists. Any editor worth his expense account makes enemies, and complaints from CEOs, politicians and World Bank presidents are common. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are unique in their thuggery, and their response to critics may help readers appreciate why taxpayers are now explicitly on the hook to rescue companies that some of us have spent years warning about.

My battles with Fan and Fred began with no great expectations. In late 2001, I got a tip that Fannie's derivatives accounting might be suspect. I asked Susan Lee to investigate, and the editorial she wrote in February 2002, "Fannie Mae Enron?", sent Fannie's shares down nearly 4% in a day. In retrospect, my only regret is the question mark.

Mr. Raines reacted with immediate fury, denouncing us in a letter to the editor as "glib, disingenuous, contorted, even irresponsible," and that was the subtle part. He turned up on CNBC to say, in essence, that we had made it all up because we didn't want poor people to own houses, while Freddie issued its own denunciation.

The companies also mobilized their Wall Street allies, who benefited both from promoting their shares and from selling their mortgage-backed securities, or MBSs. The latter is a beautiful racket, thanks to the previously implicit and now explicit government guarantee that the companies are too big to fail. The Street can hawk Fan and Fred MBSs as nearly as safe as Treasurys but with a higher yield. They make a bundle in fees.

At the time, Wall Street's Fannie apologists outdid themselves with their counterattack. One of the most slavish was Jonathan Gray, of Sanford C. Bernstein, who wrote to clients that the editorial was "unfounded and unsubstantiated" and "discredits the paper." My favorite point in his Feb. 20, 2002, Bernstein Research Call was this rebuttal to our point that "Taxpayers Are on The Hook: This is incorrect. The agencies' debt is not guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury or any agency of the Federal Government." Oops.

Mr. Gray's memo made its way to Wall Street Journal management via Michael Ellmann, a research analyst who had covered Dow Jones and was then at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. "I think Gray is far more accurate than your editorial writer. Your subscribers deserve better," he wrote to one senior executive.

I also received several interventions from friends and even Dow Jones colleagues on behalf of the companies. But I was especially startled one day to find in my mail a personal letter from George Gould, an acquaintance about whom I'd written a favorable column when he was Treasury undersecretary for finance in 1988.

Mr. Gould's letter assailed our editorials and me in nasty personal terms, and I quickly discovered the root of his vitriol: Though his letter didn't say so, he had become a director of Freddie Mac. He was still on the board when Freddie's accounting lapses finally exploded into a scandal some months later.

The companies eased their assaults when they concluded we weren't about to stop, and in any case they soon had bigger problems. Freddie's accounting fiasco became public in 2003, while Fannie's accounting blew up in 2004. Mr. Raines was forced to resign, and a report by regulator James Lockhart discovered that Fannie had rigged its earnings in a way that allowed it to pay huge bonuses to Mr. Raines and other executives.

Such a debacle after so much denial would have sunk any normal financial company, but once again Fan and Fred could fall back on their political protection. In the wake of Freddie's implosion, Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns of Florida held one hearing on its accounting practices and scheduled more in early 2004.

He was soon told that not only could he hold no more hearings, but House Speaker Dennis Hastert was stripping his subcommittee of jurisdiction over Fan and Fred's accounting and giving it to Mike Oxley's Financial Services Committee. "It was because of all their lobbying work," explains Mr. Stearns today, in epic understatement. Mr. Oxley proceeded to let Barney Frank (D., Mass.), then in the minority, roll all over him and protect the companies from stronger regulatory oversight. Mr. Oxley, who has since retired, was the featured guest at no fewer than 19 Fannie-sponsored fund-raisers.

Or consider the experience of Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, one of the GOP's bright young lights who decided in the 1990s that Fan and Fred needed more supervision. As he held town hall meetings in his district, he soon noticed a man in a well-tailored suit hanging out amid the John Deere caps and street clothes. Mr. Ryan was being stalked by a Fannie lobbyist monitoring his every word.

On another occasion, he was invited to a meeting with the Democratic mayor of Racine, which is in his district, though he wasn't sure why. When he arrived, Mr. Ryan discovered that both he and the mayor had been invited separately -- not by each other, but by a Fannie lobbyist who proceeded to tell them about the great things Fannie did for home ownership in Racine.

When none of that deterred Mr. Ryan, Fannie played rougher. It called every mortgage holder in his district, claiming (falsely) that Mr. Ryan wanted to raise the cost of their mortgage and asking if Fannie could tell the congressman to stop on their behalf. He received some 6,000 telegrams. When Mr. Ryan finally left Financial Services for a seat on Ways and Means, which doesn't oversee Fannie, he received a personal note from Mr. Raines congratulating him. "He meant good riddance," says Mr. Ryan.

Fan and Fred also couldn't prosper for as long as they have without the support of the political left, both in Congress and the intellectual class. This includes Mr. Frank and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Capitol Hill, as well as Mr. Krugman and the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein in the press. Their claim is that the companies are essential for homeownership.

Yet as studies have shown, about half of the implicit taxpayer subsidy for Fan and Fred is pocketed by shareholders and management. According to the Federal Reserve, the half that goes to homeowners adds up to a mere seven basis points on mortgages. In return for this, Fannie was able to pay no fewer than 21 of its executives more than $1 million in 2002, and in 2003 Mr. Raines pocketed more than $20 million. Fannie's left-wing defenders are underwriters of crony capitalism, not affordable housing.

So here we are this week, with the House and Senate preparing to commit taxpayer money to save Fannie and Freddie. The implicit taxpayer guarantee that Messrs. Gray and Raines and so many others said didn't exist has become explicit. Taxpayers may end up having to inject capital into the companies, in addition to guaranteeing their debt.

The abiding lesson here is what happens when you combine private profit with government power. You create political monsters that are protected both by journalists on the left and pseudo-capitalists on Wall Street, by liberal Democrats and country-club Republicans. Even now, after all of their dishonesty and failure, Fannie and Freddie could emerge from this taxpayer rescue more powerful than ever. Campaigning to spare taxpayers from that result would represent genuine "change," not that either presidential candidate seems interested.



4) Winning the War of Ideas
By JAMES K. GLASSMAN



During my confirmation hearings, Senator Lieberman called me "the supreme allied commander in the war of ideas." I like the ring of that — even though I haven't asked our allies if they agree. While the under secretary of state for public diplomacy has a big portfolio, the war of ideas will be my focus.

Click Image to Enlarge

Unless we get the war of ideas right, we will never succeed in meeting the most significant threat of our time. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it well in a speech on July 16: "Over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory. Non-military efforts — these tools of persuasion and inspiration — were indispensable to the outcome of the defining ideological struggle of the 20th century. They are just as indispensable in the 21st century — and perhaps even more so."

During the Cold War, after a slow start, we became good at public diplomacy, with such institutions as the Congress of Cultural Freedom and Radio Free Europe. But starting in the early 1990s, America, in bipartisan fashion, began to dismantle this arsenal of influence. In its 2003 report, the Djerejian Group, a commission of which I was a member, would call, in desperation, for "a new strategic direction — informed by a seriousness and commitment that matches the gravity of our approach to national defense and traditional state-to-state diplomacy."

Today, the environment has changed. Budgets have risen. Backing is bipartisan. There's a lot of talk — as usual in Washington — about restructuring public diplomacy. Structure is important, but two things are far more important: will and strategy.

The will now exists. Does the seriousness and commitment match that of our approach to national defense and state-to-state diplomacy? No. But we're swiftly moving in the right direction. Our intention is to help build a strong foundation for a program of vigorous public diplomacy for the next administration — a public diplomacy endowed with both adequate resources and with intellectual gravity. But at the same time, we plan to accomplish a great deal in the six months left in this administration.

As for strategy, we intend to use the traditional tools of public diplomacy: education and cultural exchanges; advocacy and information programs via personal contact, electrons and ink on paper; and, through the independent government agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which I used to chair, TV and radio transmissions in 60 languages, reaching an audience of 175 million per week — up 75% in the past six years.

And then, there is the war of ideas. This endeavor draws on the work of traditional public diplomacy, but, overall, it is more closely focused.

Understand, first, that the under secretary is dual-hatted: I lead the part of public diplomacy that resides at State, and I head the government-wide effort on the war of ideas — which includes coordination with the private sector as well.

The focus of today's war of ideas is counterterrorism. As the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism of 2006 puts it: "In the long run, winning the War on Terror means winning the battle of ideas."

So let me be specific. Our mission today in the war of ideas is highly focused. It is to use the tools of ideological engagement — words, deeds, and images — to create an environment hostile to violent extremism. We want to break the links among groups like Al Qaeda and their target audiences.

Unlike traditional functions of public diplomacy like education and cultural exchanges, the aim of the war of ideas is not to persuade foreign populations to adopt more favorable views of America and its policies. Instead, the war of ideas tries to ensure that negative sentiments and day-to-day grievances toward America and its allies do not manifest themselves in the form of violent extremism.

Let me put this another way. In the war of ideas, our core task is not how to fix foreigners' perceptions of the United States. Those perceptions are important — we want foreign publics to trust and respect us. But America's image is not at the center of the war of ideas.

Instead, we need to recognize that there is a complex, multi-sided battle going on in Muslim societies for power. This is a battle in which we cannot be a bystander. Instead, the battle within many Muslim societies for power affects America directly and was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 people seven years ago. In this battle, our main role is to support constructive alternatives to violent extremism.

Our priority is not to promote our brand but to help destroy theirs. We do that by showing foreign populations that the ideology and actions of the violent extremists are not in the best interests of those populations.

It is the fact that the battle is going on within Muslim society that makes our role so complicated and that requires that we ourselves not do much of the fighting. The most credible voices in this war of ideas are Muslim.

So here is our ultimate goal: A world in which the use of violence to achieve political, religious, or social objectives is no longer considered acceptable; efforts to radicalize and recruit new members are no longer successful; and the perpetrators of violent extremism are condemned and isolated.

How do we achieve such a world? Three ways:

First, by confronting the ideology that justifies and enables the violence. We try to remove the fake veneer on the reputation of extremists and allow publics to see the shame and hostility of life in terrorism. That is what worked in Al Anbar province in Iraq, as well as in Jordan and Morocco. Support for suicide bombing throughout the Muslim world has dropped sharply. The proportion of Jordanians with "a lot of confidence in Osama bin Laden" has fallen to 20% in 2007 from 56% in 2003.

This is an effort that requires credible Muslim voices to work effectively — especially voices of those, like Fadl, born Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, and known as Dr. Fadil, whose story was told recently by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker. Fadl helped build the Al Qaeda ideology and now repudiates it for its wanton violence.

We also should not shrink from confidently opposing poisonous ideas — even if they are rooted in a twisted interpretation of religious doctrine.

Second, we achieve our desired goal by offering, often in cooperation with the private sector and using the best technology including Web 2.0 social networking techniques, a full range of productive alternatives to violent extremism.

The shorthand for this policy is diversion — powerful and lasting diversion, the channeling of potential recruits away from violence with the attractions of culture, literature, music, technology, sports, education, and entrepreneurship, in addition to politics and religion.

While winning hearts and minds would be an admirable feat, the war of ideas adopts the more immediate and realistic goal of diverting impressionable segments of the population from the recruitment process. The war of ideas is really a battle of alternative visions, and our goal is to divert recruits from the violent extremist vision.

Going beyond diversion, we seek to build counter-movements by empowering groups and individuals opposed to violent extremism — movements (using both electronic and physical means) that bring people together — including believers in democratic Islam — with similar, constructive interests, such as mothers opposed to violence, built on the Mothers Against Drunk Driving model.

Our role is as a facilitator of choice. We help build networks and movements — put tools in the hands of young people to make their own choices, rather than dictating those choices. In the words of the National Security Strategy: "Freedom cannot be imposed; it must be chosen."

We have already done a major reorganization — both at State and the interagency — to help in the overall effort. The five focal points of our programs are: Muslim society, especially involving young people, at the grassroots; Middle East elites, who involve themselves in ideology and religious doctrine; foreign fighters, who have poured into Iraq and Afghanistan; Iran; and private sector expertise.

There are signs that the war of ideas, even in its nascent stages, is working. But no serious person involved in this battle thinks it is close to being won. The flow of new recruits has not stopped. Our work is ahead of us.

In the end, the mission of 21st century public diplomacy is to tell the world of a good and compassionate nation and at the same time to engage in the most important ideological contest of our time. This engagement must, by its nature, involve non-Americans that we nurture, support, and encourage

The will, as I said, now exists. As for strategy: I think that we have it right. This is a contest that we have now engaged vigorously — a contest we will win.

Mr. Glassman was sworn in on June 10 as the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. He was formerly a journalist and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article is a revised version of a speech delivered at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on July 8.

5) Theodore Roosevelt's ideas on Immigrants and being an AMERICAN in 1907.

"In the first place, we should insist if the
immigrant, who comes here in good faith, becomes an American and assimilates
himself , he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for
it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or
birthplace or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming, in
every facet, an American, and nothing but an American...There can be no divided
allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also,
isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We
have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.. and we
have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American
people."

Theodore Roosevelt 1907