Word: expectance
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Britons (who have and expect an intensely personal relationship with their politician) love to grumble about their lot and their leaders, especially if--like Blair--they've been around for a decade. So you would never guess from a few hours down the pub how much better a place Britain is now than it was a decade ago. It's more prosperous, it's healthier, it's better educated, and--with all the inevitable caveats about disaffected young Muslim men--it is the European nation most comfortable with the multicultural future that is the fate of all of them...
This attack both misreads history and misunderstands Blair. Long before 9/11 shook up conventional thinking in foreign affairs, Blair had come by two beliefs he still holds: First, that it is wrong for the rest of the world to sit back and expect the U.S. to solve the really tough questions. Second, that some things a state does within its borders justify intervention even if they do not directly threaten another nation's interests. Blair understood that today any country's problems could quickly spread. As he said in a speech in 2004, "Before Sept. 11, I was already reaching...
...sustaining a sophisticated WMD program. And the Middle East turned out to be very different from the Balkans and West Africa. In a region where religious loyalties and fissures shape societies and where the armies of "the West" summon ancient rivalries and bitter memories, it was naive to expect that an occupation would quickly change a society's nature. "When we removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein," Blair told Congress in 2003, "this was not imperialism. For these oppressed people, it was their liberation." But we have learned the hard way that it is not for the West...
...pollsters' favorite questions is this: Do you think the country is on the right track, or do you think it's going in the wrong direction? As you would expect, when the right-track number is pretty high or rising, incumbents do well (Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996), or the incumbent's party does well (George H.W. Bush in 1988). When the wrong-track number goes up, the party in power gets ousted. The public wants change and gets it by defeating the incumbent--Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush...
...received his bachelor's and master's degrees in math and engineering at Virginia Tech in 2001. The campus has an extraordinary atmosphere. I am dismayed by those who insist that security is lax. To expect that buildings have badge readers and surveillance cameras is ludicrous. An open campus is essential to university life. Installing numerous security devices would adulterate that atmosphere. Moreover, it would give a false sense of security and would not have prevented this tragedy. A very determined, very deranged young man perpetrated these atrocities. He was intent on mayhem, and he succeeded. It was the courage...