Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from David Ignatius's full February 14th column in the Washington Post.

A death threat arrived last week in the e-mail of James Njoroge Wachai, a Kenyan journalist who has written about the tribal conflict there for PostGlobal, a Web discussion I host with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. The authors of the threatening note claimed they were part of the "gang of odm," meaning that they were supporters of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) that is challenging President Mwai Kibaki.

"You are writing bad articles about ODM in American newspapers," the note said. "We are watching you and you are a marked man. . . . You will die like a cow."

Wachai exemplifies the kind of open global discussion we sought when we created PostGlobal two years ago. His first post for us, "Don't Balkanize Kenya," denounced politicians in his country who were exploiting tribal divisions to settle political scores. A second post, "Peacemakers Unfit for Peace," chided African leaders who were offering Kenya advice while ignoring human rights abuses in their own back yards. He just proposed a new piece asking why the State Department is so wary of using the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to describe the slaughter in Kenya.

Good journalism is about people writing the truth as they see it. James Wachai is our colleague in that effort. When someone threatens him, they threaten our common endeavor.

The Current Discussion: With the U.S. presidential primary season in full swing, there's a lot of talk here about "change" vs. "competence" in leadership. Which does your country have more of? Is that a good thing?

Here in the land of the fifteen-second attention span, we tend to be suckers for any political pitch that mentions change. Kennedy, Carter, Clinton -- they all promised change. For that matter, so did the brooding, volcanic Nixon and even the grandfatherly Reagan.

And it's not just in politics that we see this American addiction. In business, every chief executive promises to be a "change agent." Billions of dollars have been destroyed in these vain efforts at transformation--just look at the AOL-Time Warner merger for an example of smart people doing dumb things in the name of change.

I'm told that a gathering of U.S. intelligence officials several years ago was given a "Transformation Manifesto" with bromides like, "Instead of a chief innovation officer, our organizations may need a chief destruction officer" and, "Transformation is not a destination. It is a journey." Yikes! No wonder the U.S. intelligence community is such a mess.

Certainly America needs change, politically. After seven years, the Bush administration is a spent force. But even more, it needs competence. The truly egregious mistakes of the Bush administration were its management failures -- the ruinous mismanagement of post-war Iraq by the CPA, the stunningly botched response to Hurricane Katrina.

I'd be happy if Obama (or Hillary, or McCain, for that matter) said: I will bring change. And the essence of that change will be that the U.S. government will function effectively again, and that its leaders will make good decisions.

We don't need a change agent. We need a president.

The Current Discussion: The slaughter last week of Kikuyus and Luos in Kenya reminded us that this is a world of tribes. How should wise governments deal with the reality of tribal loyalties and tribal violence?

A lot of what appears on PostGlobal is critical of the United States, and quite properly. But on this question of tribal violence, I think the U.S. of A. actually has something to teach the world. America's gift in the 21st century is that we have learned how to make a diverse, multicultural society work.

That wasn't always the case. It took America many decades to grapple with the legacy of slavery, which the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called our "original sin." But nobody who knows America can deny that we are a different country today in terms of racial relations than we were 40 years ago. This was a painful process of change, sometimes marked by violence. But if you want to see the harvest of good that we have reaped, just watch Barack Obama on the campaign trail. If an African-American can win the Democratic primary in the white-bread state of Iowa, then we've come a long way.

America's ability to absorb Latino immigrants is being tested now, because of the huge influx of illegal immigrants. But still, this is basically a success story. Hispanic Americans are an increasingly prosperous and dynamic community.

This is America's gift: We bring together hard-working, talented people from around the world. We give them a chance to compete and prosper. Our multi-cultural society manages the tricky balance of assimilating people to certain common values, while at the same time allowing them to be faithful to their ethnic roots. We do a lot of things wrong, but this is a case where America has it right.

The Question: The U.S. starts to choose a president this week. If you could send the candidates one message, what would it be?

When I read these comments from our panelists and readers, I think: Maybe the presidential election process that began last week shows that we really are turning a page -- not just America, but the whole Bush-fatigued world.

What I hear in this PostGlobal discussion is this: America needs to be true to its own values. It needs to reconnect with the qualities that made America powerful and respected. What's striking to me is that the world (as represented by our PostGlobal sample) and the voters of Iowa are sending the same message: It's time for a change.

**Editor's Note: This week, PostGlobal asked panelists to choose the best of six proposals on how to move forward on climate change.**

When we talk about global warming, we're talking about a planetary community that doesn't exist. That's what bothers me after Bali.

When Bashir Goth says: This is all part of a plot for Western dominance, I want to respond: C'mon Bashir, we're talking about my children and your children. But he could easily answer: Sorry, David, but how many Americans are ready to stop driving their SUVs – NOW – to prevent further desertification of Somalia?

Right now, the mismatch between what we say about climate change and what we do about it is so wide, you can't even see across the divide: Why is Harvard University taking the issue of climate change more seriously than the United States government? Why is it that every other car on the road in America (including one of my own) is still an SUV? Why is the Democratic Congress still having jurisdictional fights over this issue, rather than passing legislation? Why aren't the candidates in the presidential campaign angrier about this administration's environmental record? Why are we setting declaratory goals at Bali for reduction of emissions, which are meaningless, rather than real goals? What would it take to move this issue from easy talk to painful action?

If this is truly a planetary emergency, as the Bali rhetoric says, then it must have political primacy. But I see no instrument or pathway that could make this real. That's the challenge after Bali: If the world means what it says about climate change, how will it enforce that political will?

Sometimes events create space for diplomacy where none existed before. I want to think that this might be the case with the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran.
What matters about the NIE is less the details than the atmospherics. The details themselves are hard to parse: Yes, we now believe that in 2003 Iran halted a previously unknown covert military program to build a bomb; but no, that doesn't mean Iran has stopped its threatening nuclear activity or that it has given up its ambition to be a nuclear power.
When you boil it all down, the United States has aimed its intelligence rifle at Tehran--and shot itself in the foot. It has undercut its old policy and embarrassed itself and its allies. So what's the advantage in that, you ask?
Simply this: The NIE creates a way for both parties to come to the negotiating table without losing face. Both sides can start a new narrative, in place of the old one that led to an impasse. It is this serendipitous aspect--this unexpected reversal of the parameters of the game--that interests me most.
A similar unlikely opening with Iran came in 1987, after a U.S. Navy cruiser in the Persian Gulf accidentally shot down an Iranian civilian airliner. It was an appalling tragedy, but it created space for Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to do what he dreaded, yet knew he must: end the ruinous war with Iraq. Is it possible that the NIE could provide a similar opportunity for both sides to do what is unpleasant, but necessary?

Venezuela's rejection of Mr. Chavez's "president for life" ambition is encouraging. But as various panelists have noted, he doesn't represent the "Left" any more than does Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The trend in Latin America still seems to me to be a strengthening of the center-left, after the failure of the very conservative pro-market governments in Argentina and elsewhere. The paradigmatic figure is Lula in Brazil. Maybe it's this "New Left" -- very pragmatic, market-friendly but not slavishly so -- that deserves a closer look. (Especially since something similar may be emerging in the U.S. in the 2008 presidential elections).

I would be interested to know whether PostGlobal panelists and readers see similar signs of this more confident center-left in their parts of the world.

Stripping away the rhetoric and spin, what has actually happened today in Annapolis? I find three points of note:

--Bush announced that the U.S. will act as arbiter of whether the two sides have met the conditions of the road map. This puts Rice & Co. squarely in the middle of the process as, dare I say it, an "honest broker." It gives the U.S. considerable leverage to prod the two sides, and to do the mediator's conjuring act, when necessary. The fact that the Israelis agreed to give the U.S. this leverage is Rice's biggest achievement to date.

--All sides agreed that the negotiations will be continuous through 2008. This is an important fact when we think about what next year will look like for the region. A peace process will be underway, and all the parties -- Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Saudis -- will have to deal with it. The radicals will try to blow it up, but if it's making any headway, that will be difficult. There is a narcotic -- perhaps I should say, narcoleptic -- aspect to "continuous ongoing peace negotiations." They become the focus of attention. They distract from other problems. That's not a bad thing right now.

--The Saudis and the Arab League are present as handmaidens and midwives for whatever this is. That was Secretary Rice's goal when she first began thinking about what has become Annapolis -- to get "buy-in" from the Arabs at the outset of a negotiation process, so that Abbas and the moderate Palestinians would not feel isolated. Annapolis does give the Palestinians some cover -- and it gives Israelis a small hint of what Arab recognition would feel like.

It's always easy with the Middle East to forecast failure. As a colleague said many years ago, when it comes to the Middle East, "pessimism pays." So I understand Fareed's caution. But there's a bit more here than pessimists expected.

I'm an optimist by nature. It's one of my failings as a journalist, I suspect. But I find it hard to be as optimistic about the course of the global economy as Swaminathan Aiyar. Yes, strong global demand is helping push up oil prices, and yes, a mild recession would help curb the U.S. consumption binge that produces such big trade deficits. And maybe we'll have yet another "soft landing."

But if there's one thing the last decade should have reminded us, it's that the economic law of gravity has not been suspended. What goes up does come down. What's unsustainable is not sustained. Big imbalances do have consequences. Markets do correct--and in doing so, they often overshoot.

The Fed and European central banks have been pumping new billions of liquidity into the international financial system (largely unnoticed) for a reason: They are nervous. So am I. A wise central banker commented to me recently that the best policy advice in such a delicate situation is the Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. In other words, don't do anything rash to react to the repricing of assets and currencies that's now taking place. I hope that advice is followed. I hope it works. As I said, I want to be an optimist....

First, this debate (for the most part) illustrates what we wanted when we started PostGlobal two years ago--which was to create a global online forum for discussion of issues that people care about, the more diverse the viewpoints, the better. And I think we have had good passionate debate here--from Saul Singer and Yossi Melman in Israel, from a pro-Israel Kin-Ming Liu in Hong Kong, from Daoud Kuttab, Lamis Andoni and Vivian Salama speaking from the Arab world. The posts reflect sharp differences--no surprise there--but in a way that I hope will make people think.

So what's my own take on the "Israel Lobby" question? For starters, I am not a great fan of lobbies in general. I think they tend to skew policies in the direction of interest groups that can mount effective and well-financed lobbying campaigns. I see that with the gun lobby, the anti-abortion lobby, the Armenian lobby (I'm an Armenian-American, by the way), and the lobby for corporate tax breaks. But these lobbies are a part of American democracy, circa 2007. You could no more ban them than restrict other forms of speech.

I worry whenever lobbies restrict the range of debate on an issue. Their power can become intimidating. We don't have a real debate about gun control, for example, because the power of the National Rifle Association is so great. And I worry sometimes that the U.S. debate about Middle East policy is too narrow--not necessarily because of direct pressure from AIPAC, but because of self-censorship. There is, as is often noted, a wider debate about Middle East policy within Israel than in the United States.

That wide-open debate is part of what I like so much about Israel. It's a passionate democracy. An example was my interview published last Sunday with Efraim Halevy, former director of Mossad, in which he called for talks with Iran and Syria. That's hardly evidence of the sort of lockstep thinking that critics of the Israel Lobby caution against. So I hope the "Israel Lobby," in the broadest sense--a lobby that includes a Halevy, as well as a Netanyahu--will encourage a searching debate about future policies in the Middle East. America needs it; Israel needs it; the world needs it.