"The least significant asset" and the one that costs the most….
From Froomkin’s White house report….
I think we need something very different….McCain said this…at the interview…
“We’re doing well in our military recruitment, could do better. We’ve got to do better on retention. But we have to expand the military.” – McCain
And US intelligence community analyst says this….
Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus write in The Washington Post: “An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.
“The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority — military power — will ‘be the least significant’ asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because ‘nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force.’ . . .
“‘The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished,’ Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding ‘at an accelerating pace’ in ‘political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.’”
Also….something interesting….
By Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team
“I asked former President Jimmy Carter what he thinks the next US president might have to do in his first 100 days. He said it would take 10 minutes, not 100 days. I can do no better than paraphrase his reply:
‘My country will never again torture a prisoner. We will never again attack another country unless our security is directly threatened. Human rights will be the foundation of our foreign policy. We will act on global warming. We will honor international agreements. We will bring security and peace to Israel and all its neighbors and treat them all on an equal basis.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/09/fix-it-the-first-10-minutes.html
