A Pantomime President: By Sidney Blumenthal: "There Is No There There."

[kpete]

A pantomime president

From North Korea to Iraq to Lebanon, George Bush's lack of policy has led to a string of disasters

Sidney Blumenthal
Tuesday July 18, 2006
The Guardian


President Bush was against diplomacy before he was for it. But with the collapse of US foreign policy from the Middle East to North Korea he has claimed to have become a born-again realist. "And it's, kind of ... painful ... for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page," he said at his July 7 press conference, adding, in an astonished tone, "Not everybody thinks the exact same way we think. Different words mean different things to different people."

Two years ago at the Republican convention he boasted of his "swagger, which in Texas is called walking". But in the face of the consequences of his failures, he has swaggered into a corner.


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What the president doesn't know and when he didn't know it remain pertinent. In January 2003 Bush met three prominent Iraqi dissidents who, in discussing scenarios of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, "talked about Sunnis and Shi'ites. It became apparent to them that the president was unfamiliar with these terms." Peter Galbraith, who was involved in Iraqi diplomacy as a Senate aide for decades, carefully sources this anecdote in his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End.

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The North Korea debacle shows that Bush's ruinous approach began before the Iraq invasion, indeed before 9/11. His latest pantomimes of policies recall Gertrude Stein's description of Oakland, California: "there is no there there".

more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1822909,00.html

[Bandit]

1. All I can say to this article is ......... Duhhhhh

I guess stating the obvious has to be done over and over in this once great land.