hv world affairs council

I was listening to Haviland smith earlier today. By the time his talk was over, I had started building hopes for a better foreign policy. The talk didn't demonstrate his great oratory abilities nor did it have any rhetoric or ideology that he was vouching for. Haviland's was merely an introspection into the foreign policy of US in the past 8 years. He was neither like those liberals who think we should do nothing but charity in rest of the world, nor like the republicans he constantly called horribly incorrect. At one time he called the Islamic society as repressive and inherently different from the Western democracies. He was thinking of a solution along those lines.

He said something that I had been dying to listen to from someone more mature than me -that language is important. He condemned the use of words like war-against-terror or rogue-nations. Avoiding such jingoism in language would only help a foreign policy. He questioned the assertion, both of media and administration that Muslims essentially hate the West. He actually said that Arabs have hardly ever expressed much hatred for America ; them being the core of Islamic world.