During a press conference today at the G8 summit in Russia, President Bush told President Vladimir Putin that Americans want Russia to develop a free press and free religion "like Iraq." To laughter and applause, Putin responded: "We certainly would not want to have same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq, quite honestly."
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One of the justifications for the War in Iraq was that we would establish a democracy in Iraq that would be a "shining light on the hill" to the rest of the region and to the world. One can only imagine how President Bush felt to hear foreign jeers of derision at his notion that a democracy is being established in Iraq that other nations might want to emulate.
2 comments:
This is precious. This man thinks that Iraq is an example of success that can be held up to inspire other nations? What planet does Bush live on? I guess his handlers are only reading him "happy news" in the morning. This becomes embarrasing when he's allowed outside to play with the other children.
There's a very interesting article about "post-Cold War" US policy toward Russia by Stephen Cohen in The Nation. Cohen argues that since the collapse of the USSR, the US has been using every means possible to try to leverage it's advantages to force Russia into a permanently subordinate position globally and even regionally. This policy has in fact amounted to a new Cold War. There's an audio interview with Cohen here for download here.
(Against the Grain, where that interview appeared, is a pretty good interview show. The page is worth browsing through).
Your comments got me thinking more about this unusual situation. President Bush must not have realized how President Putin and the Russian audience would react to his suggestion that Russia emulate Iraq. How can that be? He must ordinarily be shielded from any news about how most Americans and the vast majority of the world think things are going in Iraq. He must be as divorced from reality as President Nixon was immediately before his resignation. The only problem is that, unlike Nixon's, Bush's inner circle is not telling him he must resign.
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