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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (77468)	2/25/2003 2:19:59 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Yes, it was from Marshall's blog, there was a link. Sorry for the inconsistent formatting.

To: JohnM who wrote (77468)	2/26/2003 2:47:14 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush's Warsaw War Pact By MAUREEN DOWD Columnist The New York Times February 26, 2003 WASHINGTON - The diplomatic motorcade pulled up to the White House yesterday with great fanfare. The two Marine guards at the door of the colonnaded West Wing saluted smartly. TV cameras pressed close to get pictures of the vital American ally alighting from the black sedan for his one-on-one with President Bush. It was a summit of the two great strategic partners, America and Bulgaria. Bulgaria? As the world's only remaining superpower was conferring honor upon one of its only remaining friends, America smashed through the global looking glass. To get Saddam, the Bush administration has dizzily turned the world upside down and inside out. Our new best friends are the very people we used to protect our old best friends from. During the cold war, we safeguarded Old Europe from the Evil Empire. Now we have embraced the former Soviet Bloc satellites to protect us from the Security Council machinations of our former paramours France and Germany. NATO was created to protect Western Europe from the Communist hordes — namely the Bulgarians, who tried to outdo the bizarro Albanians as the most Stalinist regime in Eastern Europe and were renowned for the "thick necks" who did wet work for the K.G.B. The U.S. is now in the process of wooing the "minnows" — as some in the Pentagon disparagingly call the small countries that could deliver the votes for a Security Council resolution on going to war with Iraq. It's the battle of the pipsqueak powers: we dragoon Bulgaria to offset France dragooning Cameroon. The Bulgarians used to be the lowest of the low here. In 1998, just before the visit of the Bulgarian president, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met with President Clinton. The visit was so icy that a Clinton aide joked to reporters about Mr. Netanyahu: "We're treating him like the president of Bulgaria. Actually, I think Clinton will go jogging with the president of Bulgaria, so that's not fair." Now Secretary Don Evans flies off to Bulgaria to discuss trade, and Rummy hints we may move U.S. troops from Germany to Bulgaria. In diplomatic circles, our new allies from Eastern Europe are dryly referred to as "Bush's Warsaw Pact." As one Soviet expert put it, "Bulgaria used to be Russia's lapdog. Now it's America's lapdog." The Bulgarians were such sycophants to Russia that in the 60's they proposed becoming the 16th republic of the Soviet Union. Mr. Bush will not be the only one having trouble with the Bulgarian prime minister's name. We all will. In some press reports it's spelled Simeon Saxcoburggotski, and in others Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The tall, balding, bearded prime minister was formerly King Simeon II, a deposed child czar. He is a distant relative of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, but not Count Dracula. That's our other new best friend, Romania. Is this a good trade, the French for the Bulgarians? Sketchy facts about Bulgaria rattle around: It has a town called Plovdiv; it wants to become big in the skiing industry; its secret service stabbed an exiled dissident writer in London with a poison-tipped umbrella — a ricin-tipped umbrella, in fact; its weight-lifting team was expelled from the Olympics in a drug scandal in 2000; it sent agents to kill the pope. During the cold war Bulgaria was valued by Moscow for the canned tomatoes it sent in winter, and by France for sending attar of roses, distilled rose oil that was the binding agent for French perfume. Three famous Bulgarians: Carl Djerassi, who invented birth control pills; Christo, the original wrap artist; Boris Christof, the opera singer. In "Casablanca" there was the Bulgarian girl who offered herself to Claude Rains to get plane tickets. Avis Bohlen, a former second-in-command at the American Embassy in France and an ambassador to Sofia in the late 1990's, calls Bulgaria "a very gutsy little country" that has worked hard to improve. Ms. Bohlen is dubious about the Bush administration's volatile snits at old allies. "You can't build a foreign policy on pique," she says. She says Bulgaria will be a good ally: "They're really brilliant at math and science, and they have famous wine." So, we don't need French wine after all. nytimes.com

To: JohnM who wrote (77468)	2/26/2003 3:13:37 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Watching the war with both eyes By James Carroll Columnist The Boston Globe 2/25/2003 BECAUSE THE CIRCLE of chaos was closing in on the realm, the hero went to the troll and, forcibly subduing him, demanded to know the secret of drawing order out of chaos. The troll replied, ''Give me your left eye and I'll tell you.'' Because the hero loved his threatened people so much, he did not hesitate. He gouged out his own left eye and gave it to the troll, who then said, ''The secret of order over chaos is: Watch with both eyes.'' This story, from the late novelist John Gardner, perfectly illustrates the American problem. We are embarking on war with only one eye watching. That eye sees Iraq, Saddam Hussein, the threat of terrorism, a break with ''old Europe,'' the frightening foreground of the post 9/11 world. What we are not seeing is the larger background where far more deadly dangers lurk. We have no eye on the very real possibility that this swaggering war, coupled with the ''us-or-them'' spirit of US foreign policy, will force Russia and China back into the armed hostility of a bygone era. A restoration of that enmity will return both powers, independently or together, to the bunker of rampant nuclear threat - the only way to check Washington's unipolar and unilateral exercise of power. Ironically, that the world survived the nuclear terror of the Cold War seems to have made the American people assume that no such threat can ever reappear, which is the only reason the far lesser dangers of Saddam and Al Qaeda can have so traumatized us. But superpower nuclear danger is making a comeback. It is well known that the United States, Russia, and, to a lesser degree, China maintain globe-destroying nuclear arsenals. What has not been sufficiently noted is that the nuclear powers have stopped working toward the elimination of nukes and are again depending on them as guarantors of national sway. That was clear a year ago in Washington with the Pentagon's Nuclear Posture Review, but not only there. While Leonid Brezhnev (responding to the worldwide freeze movement) declared in 1982 that Moscow would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, Vladimir Putin (responding to NATO's 1999 air war against Serbia) renounced that promise in 2000. Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in 1986 the elimination of all nuclear weapons; Putin's ''new concept of security,'' like Bush's new ''strategic doctrine,'' assumes their permanence. And so with China. When Washington renounced the ABM Treaty last year, Beijing could reasonably assume that new US missile defense would undercut the deterrent value of China's comparatively small nuclear arsenal, forcing an escalation of offensive capacity. The militarization of China's nascent space program becomes inevitable in response to the Pentagon's resuscitated Star Wars. The arms race in orbit. What we have here - Russia bristling at US moves into Central Asia; China ever wary of US-armed Taiwan - are the preconditions of a renewed Cold War and worse. This is the background to which our missing eye makes us blind. The war in Iraq will open into all these horrors, which can rapidly spread. Russia's quickened belligerence will unsettle Eastern Europe and Germany, which, distrusting the United States, may finally pursue nukes of its own. China's escalations will spark India's, increasing pressure on Japan, at last, to embrace nuclear weapons. Already smoldering fires in North Korea and Pakistan can easily ignite. A domino theory - the falling of nuclear abstinence before mass proliferation - will be proven true after all. The new chain reaction. Watching with two eyes, we would see that in dealing with Saddam, no nation's convictions matter more than those of Russia and China. Why? Simply because they can, with us, set in motion forces to destroy the world. It is more crucial than ever, building on the near-miraculous peaceful outcome of the Cold War, to erect structures of trust and mutuality with these two former enemies. Yet the opposite is happening. If Washington were deliberately to set out to alienate Moscow and Beijing, its policy would look exactly like the Bush administration's. Americans seem hardly to have noticed that both Russia and China oppose the US plan to invade Iraq - opposition that should weigh far more than that the misgivings of France or Germany. Faced with this display of what can only appear as American imperial assault, Russia and China have good reason to feel threatened. They can be expected to hasten the construction of a counterforce aimed at limiting Washington, renewing a level of catastrophic threat that will make today's ''war on terrorism'' - and even tomorrow's war on Iraq - look like the good old days. To watch the looming US aggression with both eyes is to oppose it. ________________________________________ James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. boston.com