"I'd like to announce that tonight I'm off to buy a case of French wine."-- Nebraska senator and oenophile Chuck Hagel at the Marriott yesterday, during a speech critical of fellow Republican President Bush's "unilateralism." Hagel's cheering audience was a State Department-sponsored gathering of the National Council of International Visitors.
Alaska was sold. This piece of news arrived in St.Petersburg 136 years ago....When the news about selling Alaska became known in Russia, people refused to believe it. Newspapers would write that it was nothing but a mean, disgusting joke upon the Russian society.... As a matter of fact, the dispute is not over even today. So many tragic things have happened in the Russian history, although Alaska is still an issue for professors, students, taxi drivers, and the like. A lot of Russian people often say the following sentence: “What if Alaska remained a part of Russia?” ... as if Alaska was a chance that was taken away from Russian people.
Bertie Ahern has given his strongest indication yet that the US will be able to use Shannon Airport regardless of UN backing for war in Iraq.
The US and UK could use Jordanian and Israeli airspace to launch air strikes on Iraq if Turkey continues to refuse permission for allied bombers to operate out of its airbases to support an invasion.... Amman has tacitly agreed to overflight rights for allied aircraft.
I write to express my displeasure at your attempts to protect Saddam Hussein from the agreed upon consequences for his continued defiance of the will of those who defeated him in the 1991 war and of his own people. There can be no justification for the French defense of this murderous tyrant.
Whatever remained of the former French/American alliance--after French collaboration with the Nazis; withdrawal from the NATO military structure; Le Balon Rouge; refusal to grant overflight rights at the time of the Libya bombing; etc.--is surely now gone and the blame is wholly France's.
In future, I will urge my representatives in Congress to thwart any measure designed to aid French interests and to treat your country as what it is become: an objective enemy of the United States.
Regretfully,
Orrin C. Judd
Hanover, NH
Margaret Thatcher stiffened her legendary resolve with all-night drinking sessions, her personal assistant reveals in a new television documentary. [...]The favourite "tincture" of her avuncular husband Denis was gin and tonic. That was not enough for Maggie, once described by Ronald Reagan as the best man in England.
When Thatcher went to war against Argentina to reclaim the Falkland Islands, her personal assistant Cynthia Crawford recalled: "She'd say 'You can't drink gin and tonic in the middle of the night dear, you must have a whisky and soda because it will give you energy.'" [...]
Jane Bonham Carter, producer of the four-part documentary being aired from Thursday in Britain on ITV1, called Thatcher "arguably the most significant English woman since Queen Elizabeth I."
President George W Bush is to hold emergency talks with British and Spanish leaders on Sunday amid diplomatic deadlock at the UN Security Council over their plans for disarming Iraq.The three countries co-sponsored a draft resolution that would have given Baghdad until next Monday to disarm or face a US-led war.
But despite frantic diplomatic efforts, they have so far failed to win backing for their position, while France and Russia have threatened to veto any resolution that authorises war.
Mr Bush, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar will meet in the Azores on Sunday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The points of conflict between France and America are multiple, but what truly sets the two nations at odds is not their differences but what unites them: only the US and France still have a genuinely global view of themselves, a national self-image founded on the belief that they are the repositories of universal values. Both consider themselves, with equal conceit, to be "universal nations", in a way that Britain ceased to do with the end of empire.For all France's feigned insouciance about the torrent of American abuse it is now receiving, the French remain obsessed with America in a way that America is not obsessed with France. Indeed, except when France is behaving badly, America does not much care or think about France. This, of course, makes France even more obsessive.
In a new book entitled L'ennemi americain, Philippe Roger argues that French anti-Americanism is not so much a reaction to identifiable policies as a coherent world view perceiving America as a threat to France, a rival that has consistently belittled and frustrated French ambitions.
In this, modern French anti-Americanism is the direct descendant of French Anglophobia of the 18th and 19th centuries, the belief that a barbaric Anglo-Saxon capitalism was undermining French glory and excluding France from superpower status. Both Anglophobia and modernanti-Americanism contrast humane virtues with unbridled and uncaring capitalism, the kinder, gentler France holding back the geopolitical bully that was the British empire, and is now America. In practical terms, this has meant refusing the US access to French airspace on bombing missions to Libya in 1986, widespread French opposition to military action in Afghanistan, and the current stance over Iraq.
What really has the insiders panicked, however, is the irresponsibility of Mr. Bush and his team, their almost childish unwillingness to face up to problems that they don't feel like dealing with right now.I've talked in this column about the administration's eerie passivity in the face of a stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit: reality isn't allowed to intrude on the obsession with long-run tax cuts. That same "don't bother me, I'm busy" attitude is driving foreign policy experts, inside and outside the government, to despair.
Need I point out that North Korea, not Iraq, is the clear and present danger? Kim Jong Il's nuclear program isn't a rumor or a forgery; it's an incipient bomb assembly line. Yet the administration insists that it's a mere "regional" crisis, and refuses even to talk to Mr. Kim.
The Nelson Report, an influential foreign policy newsletter, says: "It would be difficult to exaggerate the growing mixture of anger, despair, disgust and fear actuating the foreign policy community in Washington as the attack on Iraq moves closer, and the North Korea crisis festers with no coherent U.S. policy. . . . We are at the point now where foreign policy generally, and Korea policy specifically, may become George Bush's `Waco.' . . . This time, it's Kim Jong Il (and Saddam) playing David Koresh. . . . Sober minds wrestle with how to break into the mind of George Bush."
We all hope that the war with Iraq is a swift victory, with a minimum of civilian casualties. But more and more people now realize that even if all goes well at first, it will have been the wrong war, fought for the wrong reasons--and there will be a heavy price to pay.
Reports of anti-gay harassment within the U.S. armed forces have increased sharply as American forces are mobilized for a loomingconflict in Iraq, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network reported this week.Between January 1st and March 1st, the organization reports a 30 percent spike in harassment complaints from men and women in uniform over the same period last year. The SLDN's C. Dixon Osburn said the group has already received a record 1,100 calls for assistance in 2003. [...]
"I think any form of discrimination has to be looked at," said [Secretary of State Colin] Powell. "As you know, the military has the policy, 'don't ask, don't tell,' so that somebody who is openly homosexual does not serve. I'm an advocate of that policy, I helped put that policy in place, and I'm accused, therefore, of supporting homophobia.
"But I think it's a different matter with respect to the military," Powell continued, "because you're essentially told who you're going to live with, who you're going to sleep next to, and it's a different set of circumstances in a military environment."
IT'S NOT CLEAR whether the constitutional definition of "advice and consent" will become a casualty of Miguel Estrada's fightfor a seat on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the possibility is serious and sobering. In a 55-44 vote, Democrats last week defeated a Republican attempt to break their unprecedented partisan filibuster of Estrada's nomination, opening the way for the simple-majority standard for Senate confirmation of judicial nominees to be replaced with a super-majority requirement. The Republic isn't there yet. But it's close."If we go very much further there will be obvious consequences," said Sen. Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican. "This standard will have to be applied to both parties and by both parties. This is very close to the point where you can't pull it back."
The strain on the Constitution and Senate precedent is now obvious. Less obvious is the toll the Estrada fight has taken on the relationship between the new Senate GOP leadership team and the Bush White House. While GOP senators are loath to admit it, the Estrada debate has drifted on this long because the White House and the GOP leadership could not fashion a cohesive strategy.
