Bush Flunks Diplomacy 101 (AGAIN)

[zengrifter]

Bush Flunks Diplomacy 101
How to infuriate Russia and the European Union
and waste $10 billion a year.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007, at 5:18 PM ET

As Casey Stengel once screamed, "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?"

It's one thing to waste $10 billion a year quixotically developing a missile-defense system; President Bush clearly announced from the get-go that he was determined to do that, and Congress has been complicit in his quest.

But to spark a diplomatic crisis with Russia and the European Union while doing so—that takes bungling of an unusually intense quality.

On the verge of signing a deal to place 10 anti-missile missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland, the Bush administration is getting hammered on all sides. The European Union is furious that Bush is circumventing NATO and dividing the continent. Russia's defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, is calling the plan "a serious destabilizing factor which could have significant impact on regional and global security."

...more - http://www.slate.com/id/2164831/