All Posts Tagged With: "diplomacy"
Diplomacy Is the Art of Saying “Nice Doggy” Until You Find A Big Rock
Sensing Weakness Putin Acts; Timid Recoil; U. S. Faces Threat, and Sides Are Being Picked
On a day when Russia is threatening a harsh response, beyond the diplomatic, to the placement of U. S. anti-missile radar and missiles Paul M. Weyrich Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation blames, if obliquely, cold warriors including George H. W. Bush for the wreckage in Georgia. His thesis is Russia should have been invited into NATO after the former USSR collapse and that would have prevented such aggression.
As unlikely as such deterrence seems; Weyrich’s contention is that had his advise and that of Edward (Ed) Lozansky, president of the American University, in Moscow, William S. (Bill) Lind, and Russian Parliamentarian Arkady Murashev been followed Russia’s paranoia would have been satisfied and such border wars avoided. Weyrich says that Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected president of Russia said he was open to the idea. That maybe true but the conditions mot think including NATO members would be onerous.
President George H. W. Bush’s advisers were absolutely against this idea. If he had had the foresight to disregard their counsel and push for our idea how different history very probably would be today.
Weyrich recalls visiting with Bush in the Oval Office after Dr. Robert (Bob) Krieble and I returned from Moscow, where we had found that Mikhail Gorbachev, the political rage at the time over here, was not popular in Russia. Yeltsin was much more popular. He says he told Bush if Gorbachev were replaced, his replacement could be someone more to our liking but H. W. Bush said he feared a replacement would be a Stalinist.
At that time Russia was in turmoil. It was broke. The old Soviet system was struggling to somehow stay relevant; Russia had been exposed as a paper tiger unprepared for conventional conflict but armed to the nuclear teeth, and in any case hindsight is while precise-moot. Plus former Soviet satellites had turned to the West as savior and barely scabbed over from decades of Soviet brutality and repression, and were loath to let the recently caged Bear loose into their bailiwicks.
“Is it now impossible for us to start over? Must Russia be our enemy? If it were, would we be prepared to fight another war? I don’t have the answers but it seems to me we must begin to think outside the box. Surely we must have new advisers with new thinking. The alternative is to risk sinking into the abyss of a new war with Russia. Do we need this? “asks Weyrich. Answering ,”No.”
Unfortunately Weyrich skips the key point that the U. S. and its allies need not be Russia’s enemy for it to be ours. So much so that I detect a surging optimism on the extreme left that it maybe time to reconnect with Russian cash to resurrect the American Progressive Party aka., Communist Party USA, or likely by another name and a willingness in some dachas outside Moscow to try it because they have the cash to do it.
If his mouth is open…
Conservative talking head Laura Ingraham once said about Barack Obama not wearing a U.S. flag lapel pin, “It just goes to show he’s not ready for the big time.” However, she could easily have said the same about her president, George W. Bush, on his trip to Israel this past week. George Bush has proven time and time again that he’s not ready for the big time. He continues to make that case every time he opens his mouth. In a speech intended to be given in celebration of Israel’s 60th year as a nation, George Bush managed to slip in a bit of partisan politics by comparing those in America who would create a dialogue with our supposed enemies as ‘Nazi appeasers.’
While Bush didn’t mention any names, it’s obvious that he was talking about the Democrats (since the Republicans do not use their words; they just indulge in preemptive military strikes), and he was more than likely referring to Barack Obama, who has encouraged greater dialogue with Syria and Iran. While Bush’s handlers claim he wasn’t talking about anybody in particular, they all admitted that Bush’s speech could have been interpreted as taking a swipe at Obama. Folks, that means that they wanted it to be interpreted that way. It’s difficult to understand why President Bush would bring up such an association with Nazis, given the fact that his grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped finance the Nazi party through his shady dealings with Nazi industrial, shipping and banking interests. But that’s a different article for another day. Today we’re talking about the president’s shameless use of this event for political purposes.
In just eight years, George Bush has managed to set American diplomacy back hundreds of years. It is an administration completely uninterested in diplomacy. Instead it employs the neo-con theory of pre-emptive strikes against those who will not bend to America’s will. If the intelligence doesn’t justify these wars, the Bush administration twists the intelligence to meet its needs or, failing that, simply lies to achieve its goals. This administration’s immediate answer to even the smallest amount of conflict is to flex America’s military might, such as sending a battleship to the Gulf as a warning to Iran. Talking to any nation that doesn’t fall in line with America’s ideology is out of the question. And anybody who suggests creating a dialogue with these nations is painted as ‘weak on terrorism’ or unpatriotic.
If George W. Bush were truly a leader, he would have put the election aside and used this event to highlight our long-standing alliance with Israel. However, in his determination to use his office to influence the outcome of the elections, our fearless leader squandered it on nasty, partisan politics. As has been the case so many times over the past eight years, George Bush is again exploiting the office of the U.S. presidency for political purposes. He has tarnished America’s once respected reputation. He is an embarrassment.