Additional Excerpts: Jane Cramer

North Korea as poster child: Jimmy Carter recently said about the North Korean nuclear threat, "We can solve that in half a day." And he's right. We could. That's where it was left when Clinton left office. [Colin] Powell came into office and said, "Some very promising things have been left on the table with North Korea. I'm going to get right on that." And Bush said, "No you're not." The reason Bush did that is very interesting: It was not about North Korea, but about missile defenses. If you don't have somebody building new missiles you don't need missile defenses. They wanted to build missile defenses, so they needed a poster child to justify building missile defenses. I think North Korea wants to deal with us and, yes, we will solve that very quickly, in about half a day if we are serious -- because North Korea is actually willing to stop and let us look in their closets, if we give them money so they don't starve.

Hearts and minds: The worst thing for terrorist recruitment is to go there and the best thing is to come home. If you bomb civilians, you get new Al-Qaida recruits. RAND Corporation, which is not a liberal think tank, just put out a new report saying, "the best thing in the war on terror to help stop recruitment is to get out of the region." This is what the Europeans have argued since 9/11: "We know terrorism; we've been dealing with it for a long time. It's an intelligence problem; it's a police problem. It is not a military problem. This is just a few guys, so you need the hearts and minds of civilians, and cooperation from governments all over the world." That's where Obama's going.