At least with Bush, your life didn't change that much.
Talk on the phone much?
Fly much?
One of the first things several people I know did after the "USA PATRIOT" Act was signed was to get encryption for their computers and run all their communications through them. Their lives -- all our lives -- changed just knowing that thanks to Bush, there wasn't any such thing as communications privacy any longer.
And friends of my dad gave up flying, since it had become hazardous to their health. Why? Because of the rude, intrusive, degrading procedures established by Bush aggravated heart conditions.
With Bush, our lives changed a lot -- but in ways that left us like a frog in the pan of water, not even noticing as the temperature climbed, heading toward "well done".
Obama has at least got the courage to talk to people, to apologize for our behavior as a country, which has treated those in the Middle East as a convenience for us, not really as people. I can understand their feelings, being in a part of a state that is treated by those in the urban area as their playground, so they can tell us how to live, how to use (or not use) our property, where and when we can build or even repair our houses. The U.S. has treated the people of the Middle East as serfs and pawns -- and while Bush acted as thought that was some sort of divine right, Obama is acknowledging that it was wrong.
Why would he talk to people from that part of the world first? Because that part of the world is where our biggest problem lies.
I don't know if he's read Sun Tzu's
The Art of War, but this opening gambit shows he grasps parts of it at least. If he plays well after this move, and indeed knows the art of war, in a few years we will have friends in the Muslim world doing the job of fighting the terrorists where they live.
This isn't a feel-good mission, I'm thinking. If he knows what it seems he knows, he's just changed the field of battle, or more accurately opened a new front.
Obama is looking more hard-nosed than I expected: challenging Pakistan in its dedication to fighting the extremists, upping the ante in Afghanistan, and now taking the conflict to the terrorists' own living room.
Stop and think, yn: where this war started was when U.S. dollars started fueling a worldwide Islamicist extremist movement. Thanks to past presidents, we sparked the whole madrashah and jihadist movement, and thanks to others turned it against ourselves. Obama is aiming at where you always aim in a guerilla war, in asymmetrical warfare: at the population where the enemy lives, to turn them into the enemy of our enemy by making them our friend.
That's something that General Petraeus understood in Iraq, and put to work. It's the big reason that the "surge" showed success. But Obama seems to be taking it to the whole Muslim world. And if it works, honest, decent Muslims will be turning terrorists in to their own governments, and keeping their children from seeing terrorists as heroes, and the recruits will dry up, and the havens will shrink.
It's something McCain understood and expressed idiotically with his comment about "a hundred years": this is not a conflict born on 9/11, but a conflict of generations, one that took generations building, and will take generations settling. Bush didn't get that, which was obvious because he talked to the Muslim world as though he expected they wanted to be morphed into becoming American suburbanites, to become us. Obama apparently does get it, because he's off to do his best to talk to them as themselves, not as potential American clones.
On this issue, he's not looking bad at all. This is a good move.
