The Department of Diplomacy Not!...

The Department of My Way or The Highway.





What is interesting about the current government is that their interpretation of diplomacy is to beatthe other guy senseless with a cudgel and then expect him to buy into your self-serving lies.



To my way of thinking, diplomacy has always been about is taking those with different opinions and subtlely engaging them, eventually turning them around to your way of thinking. To hear that our highest ranking diplomats now take the position that they will not “talk” to those countries who don’t agree with our flat view of the world, seems to be entirely wrong-headed. Why even bother to have a State Department if you have no intention of being diplomatic in the first place. Perhaps they should call it the Department of Heavy Hands because in order to wn any kind of currency with this department, you have to start out agreeing with their point of view. It is the world of Alice writ large.



According to my estimates, that leaves Mexico and Britain who seem to agree with us at least about fifty percent of the time. And the rest of the world viscerally and intellectually opposed to America’s position on just about anything.



It wasn’t always this way. In the past, America enjoyed considerable good will but we fritted it away with our demands and our lies.



At the time of 9/11, virtually any country in the world would have cooperated with us on just about anything but our cudgel-bearers in DC decided that not only did they have to agree with us, they had to bend over and kiss our ring before we would acknowledge them as our true friends and supporters.



In the meantime, we had convinced ourselves that we were unbeatable and that America could do anything it liked on the world stage; unfortunately, that sort of attitude had just the opposite effect on the world’s stage; it took England to save our backsides on more than one occasion and for their support, we failed to reciprocate, forcing Tony Blair into a losing battle to save face and his job.



We are now probably the only leading country in the world with no friends. Even most Canadians who have shown their unrequited love for things American, are starting to turn their backs on our policies…and were it not for all of the trade, they might snub their noses at us as well…



So, we have a State Department with players that will visit nobody because practicing diplomacy is verboten and we have a growing list of people who wouldn’t play ball with us even if they hated the other guys and we were the last country in the world.



Our former allies, in recognition of the shifting that is going on in the world, are rushing to carve new alliances and form new associations sans America and we have yet to ask ourselves why or seem to care. This seems rather odd behavior considering that we are so needful of other places to make our products and send us their high tech people so that we can fire all those domestic technology gurus who make way to much money to assure the top guys their 500 million dollar bonus checks.



It is an interesting conundrum: The House of Diplomacy that refuses to practice its craft unless you already believe in the world according to the way they see it. In the land of Bush, there is no questioning, there is no proof, there is no doubt, you either buy into what they are peddling or you are immediately persona non grata.



Some day at Harvard, they may began offering a comedy course on the Bush style of government using it as an example of policies that are, well\, “bushed.” But in the meantime, in the age of miracle weapons that keep our military industrial complex living according to the style they are accustomed to, there is a potential for miscalculation that could lead to a world conflageration because we thought that they thought…. You get the point!



Of course, all of this makes good sense in the Land of Alice and the Mad Hatter but doesn’t score many points in the land of red phones and threat vs. counter-threat.



Les Aaron

The Committee for Positive Change