Rudolph the hard-nosed

Read the Newsweek profile of Giuliani today during lunch. I think he's the kind of person I'd vote for, if it weren't for 9/11. He's smart, and focused on results. But now in the post-9/11 era, he's understandably fixated on the "war on terror" (that's what makes him look strong), and I don't want to have another president who is so obsessed and power-hungry that he can't see the real way to win the war on terror: to win over the hearts and minds of the people around the world so that terrorism becomes socially unacceptable. Bush's war has done more to fuel the fire of terrorist than almost anything else. You can see it even in Latin America on his recent tour: he's met by protestors at every stop, burning him in effigy, and torching the US flag. When is this guy going to get the wake-up call? I fear that Giuliani's inflated view of his own destiny, almost Napoleonic, would drive him to escalate the militaristic side of this war and neglect building American soft power, which is where we ought to focus our efforts.

Pief Panofsky gave a colloquim today about nuclear weapons. Very well done. It's something that should be of grave concern. Monitoring nuclear material certainly is important. But the only viable long-term solution is going to come from the private sector: multinational corporations need to build links across borders that make it financially impossible for one people to hate or attack another. Only then will we live in a safe world.