Gary said "It's fear mongering disguised as commentary".

Less damaging hopefully, because more clearly partisan, than fear-mongering disguised as patriotism and excuse for policy.

Yet the strong indications that America is more disliked today than it was 8 years ago does not deserve a mention? If something horrible happens in the US during Obama's term, it will be despite his actions, not because of them.

Mars08----I accept that America is more disliked today than it was 8 years ago due to the actions of the theocratic, authoritarian Republicans Hence the importance of Obama --to restore America's tattered reputation. America's reputation may well depend on how it deals with Iran. That includes Afghanistan where the situation is dire:

The Taliban have reorganized, advanced out of their borderland safe havens, and are now massing at the gates of Kabul, threatening to surround and throttle the capital, much as the US-backed Mujahideen once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late Eighties. Like the rerun of an old movie, all journeys out of the Afghan capital are once again confined to tanks, armored cars, and helicopters. Members of the Taliban already control over 70 percent of the country, up from just over 50 percent in November 2007, where they collect taxes, enforce Sharia law, and dispense their usual rough justice; but they do succeed, to some extent, in containing the wave of crime and corruption that has marked Hamid Karzai's rule. This has become one of the principal reasons for their growing popularity, and every month their sphere of influence increases.

The blowback from the Afghan conflict in Pakistan is more serious still. In less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari's new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud.

Dave,
I agree. The Washington neocon crowd now have to step into the public sphere and argue their case for torture and surveillance. Their Hollywood horror movie rhetoric about a terrorist coming to a prison next n door to you and could escape is not very persuasive, now that patriotism as love of country is more liberal.

Obama has a lot to do to restore America's credability and moral standing. Look at what William Dalrymple says in Pakistan in Peril in the New York Review of Books:

the Bush administration sought to silence real scrutiny of what was actually causing so many people in South and Central Asia violently to resist American influence. Serious analysis was swept under the carpet, making impossible any discussion or understanding of the "root causes" of terrorism—the growing poverty, repression, and sense of injustice that many Muslims felt at the hands of their US-backed governments, which in turn boosted anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism.... Instead, terrorism was presented by the administration as a result of a "sudden worldwide anti-Americanism rather than a result of past American policy failures."

Bush's speech to Congress, claiming that the world hated America because "they hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote," ignored the political elephant standing in the middle of the living room—US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, with its long history of unpopular interventions in the Islamic world and its uncritical support for Israel's steady colonization of the West Bank and violent repression of the Palestinians.

The good and evil Bushy conservatives did believe that America was engaged in a civilizational war against Islam. They presented a vision of an Islamic world eaten up with irrational hatred of America. So Americans should hate back and destroy the evil doers.