European stocks are seen opening higher on Friday, mirroring positive cues from the U.S. and Asia as stronger U.S. economic data eased worries over the prospects for global economic growth.
Having said that, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde said that the world economic outlook is "gloomy," and warned that no nation, irrespective of their economic status, is immune to the crisis. "The world economic outlook at the moment is not particularly rosy. It is quite gloomy," Lagarde said at a conference held at the U.S. State Department in Washington.
Banks could be in focus as Fitch Ratings downgraded its long-term credit ratings on six major global banks, including U.S. banks such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley, citing the stronger headwinds facing the banking industry as a whole amid both economic developments as well as "a myriad of regulatory changes." However, Fitch affirmed the credit ratings on Swiss banking giant UBS AG.
Tech shares may also see some action after Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, reported strong quarterly results but gave a cautious view of the second quarter amid the worsening global economy.
Asian stocks are trading mostly higher, with the benchmark indexes in China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and South Korea rising over a percent each, as positive data on the U.S. jobs market and manufacturing sector signaled the world's largest economy is strengthening.
The battered Indian rupee, which hit a record low against the greenback this week, rose 2 percent in early trading Friday, as the Reserve Bank of India stepped in to check volatility. The central bank on Thursday sold dollars through public sector banks and announced a slew of measures such as curbing currency forwards and cutting banks' forex trading limits to curb speculation in the foreign exchange market.
Meanwhile, the RBI on Friday kept repo and reverse repo rates and the cash reserve ratio unchanged even as it sees the economic growth moderating amid global economic uncertainties.
Elsewhere, Singapore's non-oil domestic exports unexpectedly rose 1.6 percent in November from a year earlier, reversing the sharp decline of 16 percent in October, data released today showed. Separately, Fitch Ratings has returned the investment grade credit rating to Indonesia and said the nation's GDP growth will average more than 6 percent per annum over the period to 2013.
Closer home, business confidence data from France and external trade figures from Eurozone are due in the European session.
French central bank governor Christian Noyer, meanwhile, slammed credit rating agencies for threatening to downgrade France's AAA status, stressing that the present economic situation warrants downgrading United Kingdom ahead of France.
"If the rating agencies feel compelled to act, they should then "begin by downgrading the United Kingdom which has bigger deficits, more debt, higher inflation, less growth than us and where credit is shrinking." Noyere said in a interview with French regional newspaper Le Telegramme in Brittany.
In corporate news, German lender Deutsche Bank AG has put its global asset management business for sale with a price tag of about 2 billion euros, or $2.61 billion, the Financial Times reported.
Utility E.ON AG said it was committed to invest $7 billion over the next five years on its comprehensive program to become a green energy provider.
Sygnis Pharma AG said the Phase II clinical trail of its experimental AX200 protein-based treatment for acute ischemic stroke showed no improvement in patient outcome relative to the placebo- treated patient.
Credit Suisse announced that Peter Antico will join as Managing Director and Head North America Rates within the Bank's Fixed Income Department, effective January 1, 2012.
The economic outlook for Eurozone continues to be subject to particularly high uncertainty and intensified downside risks related to intensified tensions in the financial markets, the European Central Bank said in its monthly bulletin.
Jennifer McKeown, senior European economist at Capital Economics, has said that Germany's downbeat economic outlook, evidenced by the latest ZEW survey, indicates that recovery has almost stalled and the economy appears to be heading for a recession in the near term amid the deepening Eurozone crisis.
The Euro Stoxx 50 index of eurozone bluechip stocks is advancing 0.60 percent, while the Stoxx Europe 50 index, which includes some major U.K. companies, is gaining 0.70 percent.
The German DAX is adding 0.97 percent and the French CAC 40 is rising 0.55 percent. The UK's FTSE 100 is advancing 0.64 percent and Switzerland's SMI is gaining 0.63 percent.
In Frankfurt, Commerzbank is adding about 4 percent on rumors about a possible bailout. Deutsche Bank is down 0.3 percent.
Allianz and MunichRe are gaining about 1 percent each.
Daimler is up 0.9 percent, while BMW is losing 0.2 percent and Volkswagen is down 0.7 percent.
Christopher Hitchens, the British- born journalist at home in the middle of U.S. political disputes including Bill Clinton’s infidelity, the war in Iraq and the role of organized religion, has died, Vanity Fair magazine said. He was 62.
Hitchens died at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, Vanity Fair reported on its Web site.
In June 2010, while publicizing a memoir, “Hitch-22,” he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He chronicled his illness in Vanity Fair while copping to the role that his tobacco habit likely played. As he wrote in 2007: “My keystone addiction is to cigarettes, without which cocktails and caffeine (and food) are meaningless.” Vanity Fair won a 2011 National Magazine Award for Hitchens’s columns about his illness.
A man of ample, strong convictions, Hitchens defied political labeling. He supported the U.S. war in Iraq before and after American public opinion turned against it. He was a critic of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, he said, deserved to be prosecuted for mass killings of civilians, including in Indochina during the Vietnam War. He called Mother Teresa “a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud.”
He backed the impeachment of President Clinton for his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, as detailed in Hitchens’s book, “No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family” (1999). He lamented George W. Bush’s “shortcomings of intellect” yet endorsed his re-election in 2004. His 2007 takedown of religion, “God Is Not Great,” was nominated for a National Book Award and spurred widespread debate.
Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, where Mr Hitchens was a contributing editor, paid tribute on the magazine's website.
"Christopher Hitchens was a wit, a charmer and a troublemaker, and to those who knew him well, he was a gift from, dare I say, God," he wrote.
He died today at the MD Anderson Cancer Centre, in Houston, after a punishing battle with oesophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his father.
He said Mr Hitchens would be remembered for his "elevated but inclusive humour" and a "staggering, almost punishing memory that held up under the most liquid of late-night conditions".
He wrote: "And to all of us, his readers, Christopher Hitchens will be remembered for the millions of words he left behind. They are his legacy. And, God love him, it was his will."
The English-American citizen, who is survived by his wife and three children, was born in Portsmouth - the son of a naval officer - and educated at private school and Oxford University.
A columnist and literary critic, he often appeared on talk shows and gave lectures.
The publication of his 2007 book God Is Not Great made him a major celebrity in his adopted homeland of the United States - he became a US citizen in 2007.
An outspoken atheist, he took on former prime minister Tony Blair in a televised debate last year in Toronto, Canada, linking God to a "celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea".
His memoir Hitch-22 was published last year, the same year he was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer.
In an interview last November, he told the BBC the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes and was possibly brought on by his "bohemian and rackety life".
Writing on Twitter, the Booker prize-winning author Salman Rushdie paid tribute to Mr Hitchens.
Goodbye, my beloved friend," he wrote.
Great voice falls silent.
Great heart stops.
Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949-December 15, 2011."
Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, wrote: "We shall miss you, your voice, your pen, & most of all your mind Christopher.
"The world is better because of you."
American pastor Rick Warren, who delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's inauguration, wrote: "My friend Christopher Hitchens has died.
"I loved & prayed for him constantly & grieve his loss. He knows the Truth now.
Christopher Eric Hitchens,April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011 was an Anglo-American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He had been a columnist and literary critic at The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.
Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger. His confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The 11 September 2001 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind.
Identified as a champion of the "New Atheism" movement, Hitchens described himself as an antitheist and a believer in the philosophical values of the Enlightenment. Hitchens said that a person "could be an atheist and wish that belief in god were correct," but that "an antitheist, a term I'm trying to get into circulation, is someone who is relieved that there's no evidence for such an assertion. He argued that the concept of god or a supreme being is a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and that free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilization. He wrote at length on atheism and the nature of religion in his 2007 book God Is Not Great.
Though Hitchens retained his British citizenship, he became a United States citizen on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial on 13 April 2007, his 58th birthday. Asteroid 57901 is named after him. His memoir, Hitch-22, was published in June 2010. Touring for the book was cut short later the same month so that he could begin treatment for newly diagnosed esophageal cancer. On December 15, 2011, Christopher Hitchens died in the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. His cause of death was pneumonia resulting from complications of his cancer.
Hitchens wrote a monthly essay on books in The Atlantic and contributed occasionally to other literary journals. One of his books, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, is a collection of such works, and Love, Poverty and War contains a section devoted to literary essays. In Why Orwell Matters, he defends Orwell's writings against modern critics as relevant today and progressive for his time. In the 2008 book Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left, many literary critiques are included of essays and other books of writers, such as David Horowitz and Edward Said.
During a three-hour interview by Book TV, he named authors who have had influence on his views, including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, P G Wodehouse and Conor Cruise O'Brien.
The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Hitchens as a "gadfly with gusto". In 2009, Hitchens was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media". However, the same article noted that he would "likely be aghast to find himself on this list", since it reduces his self-styled radicalism to mere liberalism. Hitchens' political perspective can be found in his wide ranging writings which include many of the political dialogues he published.
Hitchens became a socialist "largely as the outcome of a study of history, taking sides ... in the battles over industrialism and war and empire." In 2001, he told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine that he could no longer say "I am a socialist." Socialists, he claimed, had ceased to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as "innovative and internationalist." He stated that he had a renewed interest in the freedom of the individual from the state, but that he still considered libertarianism "ahistorical" both on the world stage and in the work of creating a stable and functional society, adding that libertarians are "more worried about the over-mighty state than the unaccountable corporation" whereas "the present state of affairs ... combines the worst of bureaucracy with the worst of the insurance companies.
In 2006, in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania debating the Jewish Tradition with Martin Amis, Hitchens commented on his political philosophy by stating "I am no longer a socialist, but I still am a Marxist". In a June 2010 interview with the New York Times, he stated that: "I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist".In 2009, in an article for The Atlantic entitled "The Revenge of Karl Marx", Hitchens frames the late-2000s recession in terms of Marx's economic analysis and notes how much Marx admired the capitalist system he was calling for the end of, but says that Marx ultimately failed to grasp how revolutionary capitalist innovation was. Hitchens was an admirer of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, commenting that "Che's death meant a lot to me and countless like me at the time, he was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do — fought and died for his beliefs." In a 1997 essay, however, he distanced himself somewhat from some of Che's actions.
He continued to regard both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky as great men, and the October Revolution as a necessary event in the modernization of Russia. In 2005, Hitchens praised Lenin's creation of "secular Russia" and his discreditation of the Russian Orthodox Church, describing it as "an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition".
Hitchens often spoke out against the Abrahamic religions, or what he called "the three great monotheisms" (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). He said: "The real axis of evil is Christianity, Judaism, and Islam". In his book, God Is Not Great, Hitchens expanded his criticism to include all religions, including those rarely criticized by Western secularists such as Hinduism and neo-paganism. His book had mixed reactions, from praise in The New York Times for his "logical flourishes and conundrums" to accusations of "intellectual and moral shabbiness" in The Financial Times. God Is Not Great was nominated for a National Book Award on 10 October 2007.
Hitchens contended that organized religion is "the main source of hatred in the world", "violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism, and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children", and that accordingly it "ought to have a great deal on its conscience". In God Is Not Great, Hitchens contends that:
above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man and woman referencing Alexander Pope. This Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person. The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. The pursuit of unfettered scientific inquiry, and the availability of new findings to masses of people by electronic means, will revolutionize our concepts of research and development. Very importantly, the divorce between the sexual life and fear, and the sexual life and disease, and the sexual life and tyranny, can now at last be attempted, on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse. And all this and more is, for the first time in our history, within the reach if not the grasp of everyone.
His book made him one of the four major advocates of the "new atheism", and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.[129] Hitchens said he would accept an invitation from any religious leader who wished to debate with him. He also served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for atheists and humanists in Washington, DC. In 2007, Hitchens began a series of written debates on the question "Is Christianity Good for the World?" with Christian theologian and pastor, Douglas Wilson, published in Christianity Today magazine.[131] This exchange eventually became a book by the same title in 2008. During their book tour to promote the book, film producer Darren Doane sent a film crew to accompany them. Doane produced the film Collision: "Is Christianity GOOD for the World?" which was released on 27 October 2009.
On 26 November 2010 Hitchens appeared in Toronto, Canada at the Munk Debates, where he debated religion with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a Roman Catholic convert. Blair argued religion is a force for good, while Hitchens was against it. Preliminary results on the Munk website said 56 per cent of the votes backed the proposition (Hitchens' position) before hearing the debate, with 22 per cent against (Blair's position), and 21 per cent undecided, with the undecided voters leaning toward Hitchens, giving him a 68 per cent to 32 per cent victory over Blair, after the debate.
In February 2006, Hitchens helped organize a pro-Denmark rally outside the Danish Embassy in Washington, DC in response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy.
Hitchens married Eleni Meleagrou, a Greek Cypriot, in 1981. They have two children, Alexander and Sophia. In 1989 Hitchens left Meleagrou for Carol Blue, an American writer. They have one daughter, Antonia.
Relationship with younger brother
Hitchens' younger brother by two-and-a-half years, Peter Hitchens, is a Christian and socially conservative journalist in London, although, like his brother, he had been a Trotskyite in the 1970s. The brothers had a protracted falling-out after Peter wrote that Christopher had once joked that he "didn't care if the Red Army watered its horses at Hendon" (a suburb of London). Christopher denied having said this and broke off contact with his brother. He then referred to his brother as "an idiot" in a letter to Commentary, and the dispute spilled into other publications as well. Christopher eventually expressed a willingness to reconcile and to meet his new nephew; shortly thereafter the brothers gave several interviews together in which they said their personal disagreements had been resolved. They appeared together on 21 June 2007 edition of BBC current affairs discussion show Question Time. The pair engaged in a formal televised debate for the first time on 3 April 2008, at Grand Valley State University, and at the Pew Forum on October 12, 2010.
A June 2006 profile on Hitchens by NPR stated: "Hitchens is known for his love of cigarettes and alcohol — and his prodigious literary output. However, in late 2007 he gave up smoking, undergoing an epiphany in Madison, Wisconsin. His brother Peter later wrote of his surprise at this decision. It was while writing his memoir Hitch-22 that he resumed smoking cigarettes and continued until his cancer diagnosis. Hitchens admits to drinking heavily; in 2003 he wrote that his daily intake of alcohol was enough "to kill or stun the average mule", noting that many great writers "did some of their finest work when blotto, smashed, polluted, shitfaced, squiffy, whiffled, and three sheets to the wind."
Anti-war British politician George Galloway, on his way to testify in front of a United States Senate sub-committee investigating the scandals in the U.N. Oil for Food program, called Hitchens a "drink-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay",[150] to which Hitchens quickly replied, "only some of which is true". Later, in a column for Slate promoting his debate with Galloway which was to take place on 14 September 2005, he elaborated on his prior response: "He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a 'popinjay' (true enough, since the word's original Webster's definition is a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest).
Oliver Burkeman writes, "Since the parting of ways on Iraq Hitchens claims to have detected a new, personalised nastiness in the attacks on him, especially over his fabled consumption of alcohol. He welcomes being attacked as a drinker 'because I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem.' He drinks, he says, 'because it makes other people less boring. I have a great terror of being bored. But I can work with or without it. It takes quite a lot to get me to slur.
In the question and answer session following a speech Hitchens gave to the Commonwealth Club of California on 9 July 2009, one audience member asked what was Hitchens' favorite whisky. Hitchens replied that "the best blended scotch in the history of the world" is Johnnie Walker Black Label. He also playfully indicated that it was the favorite whisky of, among others, the Iraqi Baath Party, the Palestinian Authority, the Libyan dictatorship, and "large branches of the Saudi Arabian Royal Family". He concluded his answer by calling it the "breakfast of champions" and exhorted the audience to "accept no substitute".
In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Hitchens wrote: "There was a time when I could reckon to outperform all but the most hardened imbibers, but I now drink relatively carefully." He described his current drinking routine on working-days as follows: "At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No 'after dinner drinks' — most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. 'Nightcaps' depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.
Reflecting on the lifestyle that supported his career as a writer he said:
"I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored — it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the moment. If you ask: would I do it again? I would probably say yes. But I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing. I decided all of life is a wager and I'm going to wager on this bit... In a strange way I don't regret it. It's just impossible for me to picture life without wine, and other things, fueling the company, keeping me reading, energising me. It worked for me. It really did.
In June 2010, Hitchens postponed his book tour for Hitch-22 to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer. He announced that he was undergoing treatment in a Vanity Fair piece entitled "Topic of Cancer". Hitchens said that he recognises the long-term prognosis is far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years". In November 2010, Hitchens cancelled a scheduled appearance in New York, where he was to debate religion writers David Hazony and Stephen Prothero on the subject of the Ten Commandments. Earlier that year, he published a piece in Vanity Fair on the subject, and was working on a book about the Ten Commandments as well.
In April 2011, Hitchens was forced to cancel a scheduled appearance at the American Atheist Convention, and instead sent a letter that stated, "Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death." He closed with "And don't keep the faith. The letter also dismissed the notion of a possible deathbed conversion, in which he claimed that "redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. In June 2011, he spoke to a University of Waterloo audience via a home video link.
In October 2011, Hitchens made a public appearance at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, TX. Atheist Alliance of America was also a participant in the joint convention.
In November 2011 George Eaton wrote in the New Statesman:
"The tragedy of Hitchens' illness is that it came at a time when he enjoyed a larger audience than ever. Of his tight circle of friends - Amis, Fenton, McEwan, Rushdie - Hitchens was the last to gain international renown, yet he is now read more widely than any of them." Eaton said, Hitchens would like to be remembered as a man that fought totalitarianism in all its forms but many remember him as a "lefty who turned right", remembering his support of the Iraq War and not, say, his support of the War in Bosnia on the side of the Moslems. Eaton concluded, "The great polemicist is certain to be remembered, but, as he is increasingly aware, perhaps not as he would like.
Hitchens died on December 15, 2011 at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
President Obama marked the coming end of the war in Iraq by welcoming home troops who have returned from the front lines on Thursday in North Carolina.
"As your Commander in Chief, and on behalf of a grateful nation, I'm proud to finally say these two words, and I know your families agree. Welcome home," the president said at Ft. Bragg, where he was joined by first lady Michelle Obama.
It wasn't a "Mission Accomplished" speech; the president acknowledged that there is more to be done in Iraq. But he was clear that the road ahead for Iraq would be governed by the Iraqis themselves.
"Iraq's not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we're leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq with a representative government that was elected by its people," he said.
The president's speech somberly recounted the challenges that the armed forces faced in Iraq, speaking of the battles in Karbala and Baghdad, "The grind of the insurgency," the surge and the process of handing over operations centers to the Iraqis. He also honored those who were killed and wounded while serving in Iraq," Over 30,000 Americans have been wounded. And those are only the wounds that show. Nearly 4,500 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice, including 202 fallen heroes from here at Fort Bragg."
And the president spoke of the sacrifices of families. "Let us give a heartfelt round of applause for every military family that has carried that load over the last nine years. You too have the thanks of a grateful nation," he said.
Steps the White House has taken to help veterans as they transition to civilian life were outlined as well as a bipartisan bill that was passed in Congress last month that gives companies tax credits for hiring veterans and wounded warriors.
The president campaigned on the policy of ending the war with Iraq and shifting our focus to the forgotten front of Afghanistan. In his 2009 inaugural address he stated, “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people.” He has not wavered from that goal since.
On August 31, 2010, he announced the end of combat operations and laid out a timeline for transfer of security to the Iraqi government. Though some believed this to be a political move it stood in stark contrast to President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” announcement on May 1, 2003, when he declared an end to major combat operations. It is difficult to argue that a conflict that still involved more than 150,000 American soldiers was anything but a major combat operation. But by the end of 2010, with a stable, though nascent government in place, Iraq was finally ready to begin the transition.
There were, of course, political and security concerns that led to a final decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by December 31. The most important was Iraq’s refusal to uphold a provision that gave immunity to American soldiers from prosecution in Iraqi courts. Obama drew a line in the sand and said this was unacceptable. He was absolutely right. Under no circumstance should the U.S. approve Status of Forces Agreements that abandon the men and women who are fighting to protect the host nation. We have our own Uniform Code of Military Justice that has and will adequately punish and prosecute service members who break local and international laws. If the Iraqi government is willing to stick to this position (which they have every right to do) they have rightly achieved the will to take responsibility for their own future.
People are astounded that Obama has been as strong and tough on the security and foreign policy questions because that was the big question mark" about him, said Republican international lawyer Rita E. Hauser, who was on Bush's Intelligence Advisory Board in 2001 but supported Obama in 2008 based on his stance on the Iraq war.
ASSESSING OBAMA'S RECORD
The Afghanistan war and tension with Iran still could be drags on Obama's foreign policy record before next November's election, but his campaign and its veteran support indicate they will focus on his successes in weakening al-Qaeda.
"His military leadership is probably a net positive for him where the economy is probably a net negative," said Peter Feaver, a professor of political science at Duke who served in the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
The Republican White House hopefuls still will have plenty of avenues through which to attack Obama, Feaver said.
Romney and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the frontunners in the Republican nominating race, repeatedly have blasted Obama's leadership on foreign affairs.
"His naive approach to Iran has allowed the ayatollahs to come to the brink of a nuclear weapon," said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
Feaver summed up possible Republican attacks.
"Obama has mishandled the Israel file. He's been slow on the Iran file. He's invested heavily in the Russian reset and that doesn't look to be going really well now. He has authorized a (troop) surge in Afghanistan but undercut it with a time frame (for withdrawal) that encouraged the enemy to wait us out," Feaver said.
There is still violence in Iraq, despite the formal end of the war, said Thomas A. Schwartz, a history and political science professor at Vanderbilt University.
"Obama is taking pride in withdrawing the troops. If something were to go wrong there it might dramatically hurt him," Schwartz said.
Sims said he was aware the main reason the war was finally declared over was not because of Obama alone, but because of the failure of the U.S. and Iraqi governments to reach an agreement over giving American soldiers legal immunity to stay.
