Today, the Turkish Parliament, in an extremely close vote, rejected allowing United States troops to invade Iraq from Turkey, even after the US had promised to sell out the Kurds, one more time, and to give Turkey a huge bribe to allow the US to use Turkey as a staging point. A hundred members of the governing party refused to vote with the government.
The Bush style of diplomacy is starting to pay dividends. The Richard Perle/Richard Cheney/Donald Rumsfeld school of new American imperialists believe that America can enforce a pax Amricana simply by being the strongest military on the planet by a factor of at least 2, and that world public opinion isn't important. As a result they have gratuitously insulted allies, not even pretended to listen to other points of view, and basically acted like schoolyard bullies. They seem to have forgotten that other countries are democracies.
Now the chickens are starting to come home to roost. I bet this won't be the last one.
Posted by Geodog at March 2, 2003 12:32 AM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.