A reader writes:
Obama directly challenged bin laden and zawahiri in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, their home countries. This could potentially (knock-on-wood) pay huge dividends in finding intelligence to, you know, actually fight and defeat al qaeda. I wonder what Frum, Bush and Co. think about this?
Also, by taking on Ahmadinejad, he deftly refined the "Axis of Evil" without using those words. It's rhetorically brilliant to use lofty idealism to define, not a cartoonish world of good and evil, but rather the complicated real world we actually live in. The nebulous "War on Terror and Other Random Things in the Middle East and North Korea and maybe Venezuela" is now a War on Al Qaeda in the mountains of Waziristan.
Another:
Yet another amazing decision, and yet another amazing execution of that decision by our president. As you have said, he has a unique ability to reach the Arab and Muslim side of the conflict, combined with the historically strong ties between America and Israel to strengthen his argument there. And in the long view, if he takes this risk and it fails miserably -- and strains ties to Israel... well, it's almost a certainty that the next president would be able to repair them if he or she chooses. If his approach doesn't work, he will bear that failure in his legacy -- but he won't have taken down the process with him. But if it does work!
Another:
The first thing I did after reading the speech on your site was to go to the English al jazeera, which quotes a "senior" Hamas official as saying it reminded him of King's "I have a dream speech." (A Hamas spokesman on a MSM site was completely negative.) Thinking about these two great speeches together made me wonder if African Americans might have a unique calling to righting wrongs in the world by just speaking truth. They often know best what goes wrong when people do not speak truth.
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