The people of this country had been, long before the adoption of their form of Constitution, the colonists and descendants of the people of England. They had lived under a Government where the discretion of the king could involve the nation in war when he pleased; they had had enough of that; and accordingly, in the Constitution, they carefully reserved the power to make war to be alone in Congress. When it is said that really our people would be better protected abroad if it was known that the President could at once use force and make war when he pleased, that those Governments would be more careful in the treatment of our citizens, what does that mean? Why is means this: a monarchical form of Government with the power of war in the hands of the Executive, is a desirable Government, better than ours. It is a power needed, and it should be had, in the Executive. Sir, the Constitution is not so; the people thought it otherwise when they made it. But it is said the President can involve this nation in war whenever he pleases, in the exercise of his diplomatic power; he has nothing to do but to send an insolent correspondence to a foreign nation and involve the nation in war. Because the President may, by abusing the power that he has, make a war, is a miserable argument that we should give him the right to make war when he pleases without abusing anything. If he abuses his diplomatic power for such a purpose, he may be impeached. If you tell him he may use his discretion about going to war when one of our men is imprisoned in Mexico, he can go to war and cannot be impeached. It is no reason, because he has the power by abusing his diplomatic functions to involve this nation in war and subject himself to an impeachment, that, therefore, you shall give him the power to make war so that he shall do it without impeachment. [my emphasis]

Los argentinos van a tener un profundo reconocimiento porque encabezó el proceso democrático a partir de 1983, pero además el juicio a las juntas militares fue un parangón histórico que le deberán reconocer.

[Argentines are going to have a deep gratitude [to Alfonsín] because he embodied the democratic process startingin 1983, but in addition, the trial of the members of the military junta was an historic paragon that should be remembered.]

De golpe, nos sentíamos libres. Algo nuevo y prometedor comenzaba. Alfonsín representó para muchos de nosotros, una época llena de esperanzas de cambio. Representó la recuperación de aquellos sueños, y el entusiasmo con el nuevo modo de vida, la democracia, incipiente, a la que apostábamos con mucha vitalidad.

La sensación de apertura. La efervescencia de la expresión después de tanto silencio, de tanta mordaza. Las instituciones educativas habían estado comandadas por personajes con pensamiento arcaico y los planes de estudios plagados de contenidos extemporáneos. Todo ello empezaba a ser sustituído. La emoción que sentíamos cuando en las librerías encontrábamos nuevamente los libros de autores que se habían prohibido, la posibilidad de poder elegir qué leer; las carteleras de cines y teatros que nos ofrecían una variedad en cantidad y calidad de temáticas, qué películas ver, qué música escuchar, qué poder decir, sin censuras...dejar de estar silenciados....no fue poca cosa...

Se nos abría un futuro. Sentíamos aires de libertad, y con fervor participábamos en proyectos impensables hasta ese momento.

[Suddenly we felt free. Something new and promising was beginning. Alfonsín represented for many of us an era full of hopes of change. He represented the recuperation of those dreams, and the enthusiasm about the new style of life, democracy, in its beginning, with which we aligned ourselves with much vitality.

The sensation of openness. The effervescence of expression after all the silence, of so much of being gagged. Educational institutions had been headed by people with archaic thinking and the study plans plagued by extemporaneous restraints. All that began to change. The emotion we felt when we newly encountered in the bookstores books by authors that had been prohibited, the possibility to choose what to read; the billboards for movie houses and theaters that offered us a variety in quantity and quality of themes, what movies to see, what music to listen to, what we could say, without censorship ... no longer being silenced ... it was not a small thing.

A future opened up before us. We felt the air of freedom, and participated with fervor in projects that had been unthinkable before this moment.

The people of Pakistan want the same things that we want: an end to terror, access to basic services, the opportunity to live their dreams, and the security that can only come with the rule of law. The single greatest threat to that future comes from al Qaeda and their extremist allies, and that is why we must stand together.

The terrorists within Pakistan's borders are not simply enemies of America or Afghanistan -- they are a grave and urgent danger to the people of Pakistan. Al Qaeda and other violent extremists have killed several thousand Pakistanis since 9/11. They've killed many Pakistani soldiers and police. They assassinated Benazir Bhutto. They've blown up buildings, derailed foreign investment, and threatened the stability of the state. So make no mistake: al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.

It's important for the American people to understand that Pakistan needs our help in going after al Qaeda. This is no simple task. The tribal regions are vast, they are rugged, and they are often ungoverned. And that's why we must focus our military assistance on the tools, training and support that Pakistan needs to root out the terrorists. And after years of mixed results, we will not, and cannot, provide a blank check.

Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders. And we will insist that action be taken -- one way or another -- when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets. ...

Al Qaeda's offers the people of Pakistan nothing but destruction.

While the emergence of "Pakistani Taliban" in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan's security, they have just been defeated in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital threat to the West: "Actually, I don't agree with that assessment, because when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. They had ready access to international communications, ready access to travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more primitive. And it's much more difficult for them to move around, much more difficult for them to communicate."

As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, nor can they "kill" it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the Pakistani public.

... Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a doomed and unnecessary enterprise. [my emphasis]

Pakistan, a country of 165 million people, is composed of six major ethnic groups, one of them the Pashtuns of the northwest. The Pakistani Taliban are largely drawn from this group. The more settled Pashtun population is centered in the North-West Frontier province, with its capital at Peshawar. Between the NWFP and Afghanistan are badlands administered rather as Native American reservations are in the U.S., called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, with a population of some 3 million. These areas abut Pashtun provinces of Afghanistan, also a multiethnic society, but one in which Pashtuns are a plurality.

The tribal Pashtuns of the FATA no man's land, a third of which is classified as "inaccessible" by the Pakistani government, have sometimes given shelter to al-Qaida or Afghan Taliban militants. Some of the Pashtun tribesmen themselves have turned militant, and have been responsible for suicide bombings at police checkpoints inside Pakistan. They are also accused of attacking targets across the border in Afghanistan and of giving refuge to Afghan Taliban who conduct cross-border raids.

The governor of the North-West Frontier province, Owais Ghani, immediately spoke out against Obama, saying that the senator's remarks had the effect of undermining the new civilian government elected last February. Ghani warned that a U.S. incursion into the northwestern tribal areas would have "disastrous" consequences for the globe.

The governor underlined that a "war on terrorism" policy depended on popular support for it, and that such support was being leeched away by U.S. strikes on the Pakistan side of the border and by statements such as Obama's. A recent American attack mistakenly killed Pakistani troops who had been sent to fight the Pakistani Taliban at American insistence. The Pakistani public was furious. Ghani complained, "Candidate Obama gave these statements; I come out openly and say such statements undermine support, don't do it."

The NWFP governor is responsible for Pakistani counterinsurgency efforts in his province and in the neighboring tribal regions. He is well thought of in Pakistan because of his successes in Baluchistan province, which he governed for five years prior to January of this year, where he combined political negotiations with militants and targeted military action when he felt it necessary. He firmly subordinated the military strategy to civilian politics and negotiations. That is, Ghani is a politician with long experience in dealing with tribal insurgencies. [my emphasis]

China has adopted markets without capitalism; it has not had broadly open, speculative markets for capital assets and land. The result is that you usually have to make something in order to get rich. So companies produce and produce, flood the markets with goods, accept low profit margins, improve quality, and hope to strike gold by exporting to the West. If they have losses, as they often do, these may be covered by borrowing from China's rotten, state-owned banks, protected by capital control. Workers thrive on the glutted market for goods. Meanwhile, the richer local governments finance themselves with land rent and spend the proceeds on infrastructure at an incredible pace. [my emphasis in bold]

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise. ...

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests —financiers, in the case of the U.S. — played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them. [my emphasis]