The AP is reporting that the Bush administration is casting another wary eye towards Syria and Iran in their attempts to hold multi-lateral talks with Iraq.
While I have always thought the all seeing Neoconservative eye to be cycloptic in its ever wary glaze of global diplomatic oversight...its pirate's patch is beginning to wear thin.
Multi-lateral talks with North Korea are fraught with U.S. conditions, stances and belligercies that sabotage even the the noblest of attempts to sit down across a table and try to be friends and find common ground... with anyone.
Sabre rattling at Nicaraguan President-elect Daniel Ortega last week and Venezuelan Hugo Chavez , cold shouldered diplomacy towards Bolivian President Morales, Brazilian President Silva and President Michelle Bachelet. These are our neighbors and democracies to the south.
Can someone tell Bush how to be friends and at peace with the Democratically elected peoples of the world !!
Mexico, France, Germany, Russia, Canada, the list goes on and on. Foreign interference in Haiti deposing the duly elected Aristide.
In 2001, Salon magazine reports:
Bush's remark Wednesday to ABC's "Good Morning America" that the U.S. would do "whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself" in the event of an attack by China is no longer the kind of comment that could be chuckled off for its poor grammar or ignorance of geopolitics.
...even though foreign policy was a clear area of weakness for the president, who called Greeks "Grecians" and Kosovars "Kosovarians," confused Slovenia and Slovakia, and failed a Boston TV reporter's pop quiz about the names of the leaders of India, Pakistan, Chechnya and Taiwan.
Bush's inability to recall the names of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Pakistani Gen. Pervaiz Musharraf (or "General," as Bush called him) and Chechen President Aslam Maskhadov -- he identified Taiwan's president, Lee Teng-hui, as "Lee" -- was defended by pols and foreign policy experts at the time.
This is a poem I wrote when President Bush went to Europe in February 2005 and told Jacques Chirac that he needed a good hand on the ranch.(???!!!)
Happy Entrails to You
"He needs a good cowboy" down on the Ranch?
So now he's recruiting in Brussels and France?
They're snickering in Paris
Guffaws in New York
The White House is praying
he doesn't uncork.
Hop-a long Cassidy sure would be proud
to screen for a cowpoke in Belgium...out loud!
Someone should whisper that this aint the crowd
for ropin' and ridin' and fields that need plowed.
Maybe he'll find one in Mainz or Moscow
someone like Festus ... to serve up the chow?
or someone immortal like legend John Wayne
who likes enchiladas and bordeaux champagne.
We thought that this trip was a trip to amend
the rift of the allies of whom we offend
and not of a nature to again condescend
for cowboys in Europe...I don't recommend!
I am sure that 50 years from now... people and historians will look back at this time and wonder...what the hell happened during that period of time?
Post Traumatic 9-11 Disorder and Paranoiastroika ruled politics, foreign policy and the world. When Bush got a thumpin' at home, while he was gittin' tuff when abroad.