Romesh Ratnesar
is Deputy Editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. A former Time deputy managing editor and foreign editor, he has reported from many countries around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel and the Palestinian territories.
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Category: Articles
Obama at West Point. Can he Make the Moral Case?
I recently published my piece on Obama's West Point speech at Time: "Obama at West Point. Can he Make the Moral Case?". Here's how it begins:
If the leaks and speculation are anything to go on, President Barack Obama will deliver a number of different messages in his Tuesday-night speech about the war in Afghanistan. He will announce plans to send some 30,000 additional troops to the war zone. He will lay out benchmarks that the government of Hamid Karzai will be expected to meet. He may even sketch a timetable for an eventual U.S. withdrawal. At some point, he will likely describe the conflict in Afghanistan as a war of necessity.The mere fact that Obama has reached a decision on Afghanistan, coupled with the speech's West Point backdrop and the President's oratorical gifts, will probably boost public support for the war effort in the short run. But it is unlikely to convince most Americans that a war that has already lasted more than eight years is worth fighting indefinitely.
My “Tear Down this Wall” Annotations in the New York Post
The New York Post has published my annotations on Reagan's 1987 Brandenburg Gate speech. Here's an excerpt:
"Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies and gentlemen:
Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the City Hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn, to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city." (see footnote 1 below)
1. Throughout the Cold War, Berlin was the most visible proving ground of the US-Soviet conflict. When Kennedy visited in 1963, two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, close to a million West Berliners turned out to see him. Reagan first visited Berlin in 1978, before his 1980 run for President. During that trip, he went to an office building overlooking the Wall. “You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look,” says Peter Hannaford, a longtime aide who accompanied Reagan to Berlin, “that he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go.”
Read more at the New York Post.