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Turkish and American officials continued their diplomatic brinkmanship today, as the Turks said they were waiting for the Bush administration to answer their demand for an economic aid package worth as much as $32 billion to ensure their participation in a war with Iraq. ... The Turkish request is about $6 billion higher than what American officials said over the weekend was their final offer. Of the $26 billion Washington has offered, $20 billion is in loan guarantees and $6 billion in direct grants. Although a Western diplomat said the Turks were seeking about $10 billion in direct aid, the White House is adamant that $6 billion is the limit for direct aid. It remains to be seen whether negotiations will begin anew or whether the administration's plan to use Turkey as a launching pad for an invasion of northern Iraq will fall through. That prospect seemed to put an unusual strain on the relationship between the longtime allies, who have been speaking of each other in increasingly harsh tones.
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History keeps coming back, sometimes like a bad dinner. In case you missed the '30s, you could experience it again last week watching the Security Council at the United Nations, which begins to bear an uncanny resemblance to the late League of Nations.
Jacques Chirac has gone from the simply arrogant to the pathologically offensive. He has alienated the Americans in a way that will not be forgotten for a generation. But he has also now insulted the new Eastern European accession countries for European Union membership with a recklessness that is truly breathtaking.Eastern Europeans lived under Soviet oppression for decades. Hence they cherish liberty, something Chirac obviously does not understand.
To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil.
There is a huge struggle going on in Europe between those who want to forge an anti-American socialist super-state and those who want to unite Europe around principles of nation-states, a trans-Atlantic bond and free trade. Imagine in the current crisis if Britain's foreign policy were subservient to Brussels and you get an idea of the stakes.
Three giant cargo ships are being tracked by US and British intelligence on suspicion that they might be carrying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Each with a deadweight of 35,000 to 40,000 tonnes, the ships have been sailing around the world's oceans for the past three months while maintaining radio silence in clear violation of international maritime law
Chirac's warning to the new Europeans of EU and NATO enlargement that they cannot side too much with America and fit his definition of membership in the family of Europe has exposed, with an outburst of pure rage, a profound, long-term contradiction that could tear the EU apart from within. ... [With their] shared borders and history of savaging Eastern Europe, the Germans are in no position to use the menacing and near-condescending language that came from the French president. ...The intensity of the confrontation and the willingness of the East Europeans to make references to appeasement while continuing to state their affinity for the American position on Iraq, especially after France and Germany had brought Russia along to join their challenge to the United States, has clearly gone beyond what France had calculated.
In a weekend meeting of German and Czech officials in Munich, the Czech Republic's foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda, recalled the Munich agreement of 1938, when Czechoslovakia was sold out to the Nazis by Western Europe, and warned of the consequences of appeasing a totalitarian regime. The same suggestion to appeasement, with its implicit linking of Iraq and a part of Europe, was made more directly on Monday by President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, an EU and NATO candidate. Commenting on the different attitudes in Europe after the massive anti-war marches over the weekend, she said of Latvia's post-World War II occupation by the Soviet Union,
We certainly have seen the results of appeasement. It's much easier to tolerate a dictator when he's dictating over somebody else's life and not your own.