The Day Diplomacy Died

[Joanne98]

In our special Memorial Day edition, World Beat is publishing an obituary for Diplomacy, which died prematurely last week after an extended illness.

The last seven years or so were difficult ones for Diplomacy. According to press reports, the mainstay of foreign policy began complaining of chest pains and nausea in 2001. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Diplomacy sustained several shocks to the system, went into intensive care, and very nearly succumbed. But it was last week that its heart and soul finally gave up after a double-barreled assault by President George W. Bush and his presumptive successor John McCain.

The proximate cause of death was a pair of speeches. President Bush, talking before the Israeli parliament on May 15, declared that “some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” Diplomacy, which had always maintained that negotiating with adversaries was the very lifeblood of international relations, suffered a stroke on hearing the president’s words.

The killing blow, however, came from John McCain. The Republican presidential candidate assailed Diplomacy in an effort to get at Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama. According to McCain, Obama doesn’t understand the “basic realities of international relations” because he favors sitting down and talking to people like Raul Castro in Cuba and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. McCain’s words, and the possibility that he might bring such an attitude into the White House in 2009, were simply too much for Diplomacy.

Gathered around the deathbed in a last-ditch effort to revive the ailing patient, former secretary of state in the Reagan administration James Baker repeated his assertion from 2006 that “talking to an enemy is not in my view appeasement.” Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) was there as well to give a little pep talk : “This kind of political attack rhetoric masquerading as policy is exactly why we’re in such trouble around the world, why we’re less secure and our adversaries are stronger.” Christopher Hill, the administration’s point person on the nuclear talks with former “evil axis” nation North Korea, phoned in with a tribute to Diplomacy, but the reception was not good and the message probably didn’t get through.

These emergency interventions were not enough. Diplomacy stopped breathing, and the president overruled attempts by next of kin in the State Department to invoke extraordinary measures. With Diplomacy out of the way, the Bush administration has given indications that it will attack Iran before the end of the year. In others signs of Diplomacy’s passing, the administration continues to refuse to talk to Syria and maintains its policy of freezing Hamas out of any settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian issue.


Whither Appeasement?

http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/5252

[librechik]

1. Never forget the bloodthirsty look in Grampa's eyes when he said "I will NEVER SURRENDER"

That's what he thinks about the State Dept, Diplomacy and negotiations for peace.

He wants to turn the clock back to the 19th century when such sabre rattling declarations of honor didn't require that ALL OF US DIE in a radioactive horror.

We have to put an end to war now and forever, or there won't be a next century for us.

Republicans must be exposed for the bloodsucking destructive Typhoid Marys they are.