we are not rewarding anybody by talking to them..understand this you republican thugs..this is the whole point of diplomacy which miserably failed thanx to loser Gondoleesa Rice..and thats how you achieve some of your goals..by the art of compromise..and take into consideration the interest of the other party..

anyway..as long as any american administration’s primary goal is to attack Israel’s enemies the world will not cooperate..
why dont we mind our own business in this tough time and stop favoring Israel’s national interests to ours????..after all the Russians are seeing to their national interests above all..

But back to Russia and the Bushies. The Georgia War was the culmination of years of provoking Russia without thinking through the consequences of what would happen once the Russians finally pushed back.

Hank Paulson was in Moscow two months before Saakashvili marched on South Ossetia (an offensive that we could have hardly not noticed the preparations for, with our thousand U.S. Marines and contractors on the ground around Tblisi) pleading with the Russians to hold on to their Fannie and Freddie paper and other U.S. debt. The Russian had $70 billion in U.S. agency debt alone, but Cheney (and on the Democrat side, people like that old fart Z. Bzerzinski) wanted to refight the Great Game with them over Central Asian oil and gas (whaddya know, the U.S. and Russia refought the Great Game, but the Chinese won, laughing all the way to the bank at our stupidity). The propaganda machine against Putin only kicked into full gear when Misha Khodorkovsky went to jail for trying to sell 40% of the Russian oil industry to a consortium of Western oil majors.

So you are hardly talking to a Bush-Cheney apologist here.

precisely, it’s what O is doing, didn’t Clinta made her first official trip there ? and O to Canada ?

how O snobbed the favorite “lèche-bottes” to the US ?

the wind reversed, Chineses are more useful, umm also this is the unknown happening, how the Chineses will take profit of this addubment ?

And yes, Pakistan one part of the problem. And Bush didn’t handle that well either…he went the “make Musharaff an ally” route and never wavered…even after Musharaff proved that he either wasn’t capable or willing to do what needed to be done. Bush didn’t do anything about it…if we needed to go into a second country, it should have been Pakistan. But because they have nukes, Bush couldn’t and so he just did nothing. And, because we have insufficient troops there, Pakistan isn’t the only problem because the Taliban has plenty of territory withing Afghanistan (and growing by all accounts…hence the surge). Either way, it was badly mismanaged, which was my entire point there.

“Do you really think the Iranians completely shut down the program in 2005 then suddenly restarted it just now?”

First, I wasn’t talking about 2005, I was talking about 2001 when the Axis of Evil bomb was launched. Further, I did say that they weren’t “publicly” building nukes. The point was to say that Bush was so impotent (even after we got Iran to reach out to us in 2005) that they decided they didn’t even need to hide it. In fact, it became advantageous not to as they could look good in the region because they could stand up to the big bad Americans and they couldn’t do anything about it. That they went public with it should be an obvoius negative towards Bush.

Same point on North Korea. Even if they were working hard and fast covertly, they couldn’t go as fast as they could if they could do it publicly and without inspectors around (even they admit that). So thanks to Bush they went public, kicked out the inspectors, and accelerated the process. That was also a huge success for the U.S.

Again, I’m not saying how wonderful Obama is or will be on Foreign Policy, but to hear Republicans falling all overthemselves about “Bush the foreign policy wunderkind” just makes me wonder if this country will ever get it together. It’s turning into a sport where you defend your side whether it’s defensible or valid or just fun to do on a blog.

Jack

These people almost got us into a second Cuban Missile Crisis with their attempt to turn Georgia into an anti-Russian client state in the Caucases. Beltway Bandits like Randy Scheunemann don’t give a damn about conservatism, the Republican Party, or even getting their bosses like John McCain elected, just keeping that gravy train going. And don’t believe Kim Zigfeld when she (he) says he wants to help the freedom loving people of Russia, Kim thinks the Russians deserve to die off and hand their country over to the Chinese already, who presumably will be more generous on oil and gas deals (Ha!)

Fortunately Kim Zigfeld (more likely, a middle aged dude, considering all the other sock puppets with identical language are male) is about to run out of money, so at least there’s a silver lining to this economic meltdown.