13.3.07

'Gringo Go Home':US Foreign Policy Missed Opportunities in the Americas and the ME

I was trying to find some meaning in the recent moves the US was making in its foreign policy in the ME as they were seen by many as a Turn. I came down to the conclusion that it was only a cosmetic move meant to hide the fact that the US is intent to reject the blame of the Iraqi nightmare on Iraq's neighbours in order to continue its belligerant policies in the ME.

The US should look back at its foreign policy in central and Latin America and ponders what the Middle East would look like in fourty years from now should we be able to grow leaders like Castro, Chavez, Morales, Lula, Bachelet and Kirshner (L'impossible rêve !).


Reading about Bush's recent visits to central and Latin American countries, I had to come down to the same conclusion. Bush never showed a real interest in this America except when he actively sent logistic support to the Venezuelian opposition to undemocratically throw Chavez. After he failed, he didn't show the same persistance as in the ME, he gave up. So what he is up to now visiting what is becoming increasingly anti-Bush territory ? I mean this is like Bin Laden visiting New York. US foreign policy in the Americas during the last forty years has left many American countries with more dead bodies than Bin Laden's terrorist foreign policy toward the US. Chavez wanted to tell Bush this simple fact by meeting with the Argentinian mothers in a show of protest in Buenos Aires.


Watch the video of Chavez's Latin American tour which coincided with Bush's tour:



And it appears that Bush and his administration are up again for some cosmetic surgery trying to help salvage, on the internal front, an embattled republican party, and an increasingly negative image of the US in the world. The failing of US foreign policy in the Americas, a place where this policy could have sized many opportunities to succeed, given the natural geopolitical and historical proximity, should remind the world that the US would in no way be better in dealing with radically different cultures and faraway countries and that the world would be better off without this kind of international leadership than with it.

Even Cubans who have been hoping for some change in their country, are prepared to oppose any US, or US sponsored interference, in their internal affairs. They don't see the US as their saviour, they don't even want their cousins in the US, who pretend to fight for their rights in Cuba, to save them from Castro. They want to be the actors of their own destiny and change, with or without the Castro regime. Cuban expatriates in Miami, who are the most vehement critics of the Castro regime, and probably the most influential group among US republicans and democrats, after Zionists and Christian Zionists, are starting to understand this and to adopt the very tactics they are denouncing in the Castro regime; silencing press freedom in their owned news outlets in order to toughen things up against Castro. They have twice fired a Cuban journalist and opponent to the Castro regime for doing his job with objectivity, unwilling to take a spin approach to journalism by distorting facts and misinforming.

Looking at the disastrous results of the US foreign policies in the Americas and the ME, citizens across the globe understand one thing: they are better off without this foreign policy than with it !

© Le Monde.fr

On the subject of US foreign policy from an anti-Bush perspective Candide's Notebooks writes 'What Bush squandered'. But I think it even started before Bush and Bush took the paradigm of bad foreign policy to a point of no return.

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