BANGOR – America is at the beginning of a turbulent era in its history, conservative analyst William Kristol said Tuesday, as the country navigates troubled political waters abroad while seeking to manage terrorist threats at home and in the Middle East.

“The world we grew up in is not the world we live in now,” Kristol told the 200 people at the Husson College Center for Family Business in his afternoon speech – the inaugural installment of the school’s new Distinguished Lecture Series.

“The question of how to deal with terror and that threat is not going away,” Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine and regular contributor to the Fox News channel, later said. “We are not going to go back to a stable, predictable world of foreign policy.”

Kristol equated America’s current situation to the first years of the Cold War, dubbing the new era “dangerous and turbulent, but promising.”

He said the Middle East – namely America’s ability to promote democracy in Iraq and quell threats from neighboring Iran – would be the country’s greatest challenge in the coming years.

Although the Bush administration has made mistakes in the region, the president generally has had the right instincts in Iraq, Kristol said.

“You could not go back to a pre-9-11 Middle East or couldn’t hope to,” he said. “We had to intervene, and we had to go in and get Saddam [Hussein].”

But public opinion of Bush’s handling of the war has plummeted in recent months, and during Kristol’s 30-minute speech, a skeptical Crystal Saleh sat attentively in the back of the room. The 21-year-old finance major is forming a Husson chapter of the Maine College Democrats, and said her family’s ties to the region gave her a different impression of the conflict.

“A lot of the things he talked about, I see differently, not only in a liberal aspect but personally,” said Saleh, whose father is from Baghdad. Saddam’s ouster has “caused more problems than anything else,” she said in an interview after the speech.

“There were other ways to get to him,” she said, warning that a Shiite-led government likely would lead to civil war.

After hearing Saleh’s position, Jared Grover, vice chairman if the Husson College Republicans, contended that Saddam’s historical ties to terrorists were reasons enough to remove him from power.

“To me … the thing that is more important about the war is what we’re fighting against and what we’re trying to prevent,” said Grover, 27, who took notes during much of the speech. “He was a threat not only to his people, but the world.”