The War in Afghanistan
Even though Afghanistan is a religious war between extremist fundamentalist Muslims and more moderate Muslims, all religions go to the same place.
When US President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December 2009, Obama spent the majority of his acceptance speech defending "just wars", even as he was accepting a prize for world peace. This is no more contradictory than the funding of the Peace Prize, which comes from an endowment created by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite -- the basis for all modern non-nuclear weapons.
Unlike Obama, who was a child during the Vietnam war, Eckhart was a college student in the 1960's, when young men in the US were drafted into a war that no country in the world considered a "just war". Like Iraq, Vietnam did not attack the US homeland, and like George Bush's war in Iraq, the U.S. in Vietnam involved itself in a civil war between capitalism and communism.
After the Vietnam war ended, Southeast Asia did not fall to communist domination. Astonishingly, nothing happened, which brings us to Eckhart's message of trusting life. In the end, the new united Vietnam is now friendly with the US and the deaths, injuries, and trauma the US sustained for nearly a decade was a complete waste. The primary objection to the Vietnam war came not only from pacifists and peace activists like Eckhart, but from draftees send overseas against their will. This is why the Pentagon likes their armed forces to be comprised of volunteers as opposed to draftees. These volunteer soldiers want to fight and signed up on their own for the job.
Eckhart's message for the current US president is that even though Afghanistan is a religious war between extremist fundamentalist Muslims and more moderate Muslims, all religions go to the same place. Despite the Taliban's hatred and abuse of women, it is a fact that the arabic Ar-Rahm (which means womb) derives its name from Ar-Rahman (one of many words for Allah).
If all religions go to the same place and life itself is trustworthy, then perhaps the message best sent to Obama from A New Earth is if Obama, the Peace Nobel Laureate, wishes to lead our planet then he must continue the initiatives he spoke about in Cairo and demonstrate as a world leader that if all religions go to the same place, then there is nothing to fight about; that reconciliation backed by economic and military force will allow life to move the evolutionary impulse forward.