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Saturday, March 07, 2009

Rebuilding Relationships

President Bush was continuously castigated by the left in this country and by leftists around the world for endangering our relationships with key allies. To the extent that this was true with France and Germany when socialists were in charge of both countries, we developed excellent relations with them when the socialists were thrown out.

During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama constantly derided Bush on this point and promised to restore relationships. Let’s examine what has happened in a little over a month:

1. The Prime Minister of Great Britain was insulted by the way he was treated when he came to Washington, DC for a summit meeting of two key allies. Shortly before that, the Obamas returned to Great Britain a special gift (a bronze bust of Winston Churchill) that had been presented by them to us after 9/11 as a token of their solidarity with us. The Brits were not pleased.

2. Statements by Obama and Clinton about the Palestinians and Gaza and the pledge of many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Hamas terrorists in Gaza have badly shaken the Israelis.

3. President Bush painstakingly developed an agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic to place missile sites in their countries aimed at shooting down the Iranian missiles everyone with any sense expects eventually to come if their nuclear weapons program is not stopped. The missiles would protect European countries who could be blackmailed or destroyed by these missiles – as well as protect American soldiers stationed in various European countries.

Bush nursed these relationships and got both Poland and the Czechs to agree to station the missiles in their countries even in the face of direct threats against both countries by the Russians.

Now, a supposedly secret letter from Obama to the Russian president has been revealed – a letter which offers to withdraw from the missile pact with Poland and the Czech Republic if Russia will help with negotiations with Iran for Iran to give up its nuclear weapons’ ambitions. The naivete that this move reveals is astonishing. The stab in the back that Poland and the Czech Republic have received will not be forgotten by them or by their children or by their grandchildren.

As far as the Russians are concerned, they may have shown their disdain for the new American president by sending a bomber to probe Canada’s airspace the day before Obama arrived there. It was certainly a message of some sort – a return to a game played during the Soviet-American standoff called the Cold War.

Russian bomber neared Canada before Obama visit

Feb 27, 2009 Reuters (Excerpt)

OTTAWA (Reuters) – “Canadian fighters planes scrambled to intercept an approaching Russian bomber less than 24 hours before U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Ottawa last week, Canadian Defense Minister Peter MacKay said on Friday.

The long-range Bear bomber did not enter Canada's Arctic airspace but the two CF-18 fighters had to order the plane to "back off", MacKay told a news conference.

He also told reporters that Russia had not warned Canada that the flight was coming, a statement that a Russian government source in Moscow dismissed as farcical.

The Russian government source said Canada had been informed about the flight before it took off.

"So the statements from Canada's defense ministry are perplexing to say the least and cannot be called anything other than a farce," Interfax news agency quoted the source as saying.

Canada quickly denied receiving any advance notice.

Obama spent a few hours in the Canadian capital on February 19 on his first foreign trip since becoming president.

"I'm not going to stand here and accuse the Russians of having deliberately done this during the presidential visit but it was a strong coincidence, which we met with the presence, as we always do, of F-18 fighter planes ... and sent a strong signal that they should back off and stay out of our air space," MacKay said.

He also said Russia had stepped up its bomber flights toward the Canadian Arctic in the last few years, reviving a practice that was common during the Cold War.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he was very concerned by the incident.”

Yesterday, Mrs. Clinton embarrassed us with a series of gaffs involving relationships with Russia and insulting references that ignored the history of democracy in Europe, drawing guffaws, and an early viewer has reminded me that the Indians have already objected to Obama's attempt to interject himself into their long-standing Kashmir problem. This is really the way to restore relations with allies; this is change you can believe in.

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5 Comments:

At 7:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've always thought that Jimmy Carter was the worse president in the history of our country up until now. Obama has got to be the worse U.S. president as of right now, and if this country survives, history will prove me to be right. In the very short time that Obama has taken office, he has done more damage than any president that I've ever known. This whole Rush Limbaugh brouhaha that is coming out of the White House right now is just a big diversionary smoke screen crafted by the same Clintonite henchmen such as Paul Begala and James Carville, and it's all engineered to hide Obama's ineptness as a leader. Obama isn't his own man, Nancy Pelosi is. Yet, his approval rating hasn't fallen which is probably due to as Bernie Goldberg put it, "unsophisticated voters who aren't really plugged in." Fox News has been constantly running old Obama campaign clips of him talking about doing away with earmarks, and this "Transparency" crap that he was spieling, as compared to his 9000 earmarks in a bill that he rushed through so fast, that no one got to even read it. That guy isn't a president. He's nothing but a liar and a cheat! I hope that enough Democrats an Republicans come to their senses and put a stop to this foolish idiot before he sells our country to Red China!

 
At 8:48 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The naivete of these people is astounding and scary. Nobody at the State Department even knows how to translate the word "Reset" into Russian? And they want to solve the Middle East crisis?

They are dumping on our friends and kissing the @$$es of our enemies. God help us.

 
At 2:20 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Come on people, everyone makes mistakes. If we summed up the number of mistakes the Bush administration made and Bush himself it would come up to a 1000 for sure. Mr. Obama is a human being too and of course humans can't be perfect. I think everyone is just expecting so much from him that every little mistakes that he does will be frowned upon and greatly talked about. Which is just wrong, give him a break people, he's trying hard.

Take care, Jay

 
At 11:40 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This excerpt from "The Times On Line" may explain Obama's antipathy toward Churchill.

Mr Obama shows little evidence of the Anglophilia that led his predecessors to pepper speeches with quotations from Churchill. Instead, there have been suggestions that he has reason to disdain the former Prime Minister. In 1952 Churchill declared the Kenya emergency in the homeland of Mr Obama’s father, sending in troops to crush the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule. Among the Kenyans who were detained without trial and allegedly tortured by the British was Hussein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather.

 
At 11:47 AM, Blogger RussWilcox said...

The United States has larger interests at stake. Obama should take his anger out on Senator Byrd.

 

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