“Today in the Senate, I met with Senators Jon Kyl and Mark Kirk. The meeting is very useful because it shows that the alternative to Barack Obama is a collapse of all the programs of cooperation with Russia. Today, I had the impression that I was transported in a time machine back several decades, and in front of me sat two monsters of the Cold War, who looked at me not through pupils, but targeting sights.”
—Russia’s ambassador to NATO is none too pleased with US conservatives. Wait till you see what one of those conservatives said in response.Israel apologizes to Egypt for deaths of security personnel in cross-border shootings
alarabiya.netIsraeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak apologized to Egypt for the deaths of at least five of its security personnel in cross-border shootings two months ago.
The incident, triggered by an Israeli response to gunmen who killed eight Israelis on a border road in August, caused the worst diplomatic row between the two countries since President Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow by a popular uprising in February.Barak’s office said in a statement late on Tuesday, citing a joint investigation with the Egyptian military, that he had decided “to apologize before Egypt on the deaths of all Egyptian police while carrying out their duties, as a result of gunfire by our (Israeli) forces.”
A senior Egyptian intelligence official had earlier told Reuters high-level talks on the matter had been held in recent days in which Egypt had again “demanded an apology from the Israelis over the border incident.”
Egypt was the first of two Arab countries to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state, in 1979, followed by Jordan in 1994.
Israeli ties with Turkey have been strained over Israel’s rejection so far of Ankara’s demands for an apology for the killing last year of nine of its nationals on board a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that Israel said was in breach of its blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory.
I still feel pretty uncomfortable about it… killed in ‘crossfire’?
Diplomatic Dystopia
The response to Rodman’s trip also seems connected to a larger, more troubling phenomenon, which is the persistent strain in the popular imagination that there is something simply funny about North Korea itself. The country’s secrecy, its technological backwardness, its ham-fisted and anachronistic public pageantry, and the Kim regime’s well-documented eccentricity all add up to a subject for which the Onion headlines write themselves. When the most you know about a country’s leader is that he was a fanatical devotee of Michael Jackson, and the most you know about his son is that he loves basketball, then it is easy to look for the next joke in the news that trickles across that country’s borders. So last week, there was a sense that North Korea and Rodman, two versions of strange and damaging excess, somehow deserved each other. There are, of course, twenty-five million or so North Korean citizens who may disagree. Leave it to Gawker, which illustrated a post on the trip with photographs of North Korean famine victims, to remind us of the moral questions posed by Rodman’s goofy escapade. The world has turned on its head: dystopia, indeed.
Ian Crouch on Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea as the guest of honor of Kim Jong-un: http://nyr.kr/Z2Msnf
Photograph by Jason Mojica/VICE/AP
The Diplomat
Wherever common ground can be,
Whenever opinions clash:
Expect always to concede,
Or else be rather rash.
For where all parties understand
The secret of concession,
There the future is secure;
Safe beyond regression.
So let bygones and has-beens be,
And look not to cast past blame:
For only he who would not compromise with me
Is worthy of the same.
“It is running from one meeting to another meeting; it is checking that the cars are there at the right moment; it is finding a restaurant when suddenly a minister says, ‘I want to eat a hamburger.’ It is sending a security guard to Abercrombie to buy a T-shirt for a teenager. It is really an exciting thing. It is trying to find the minister of Uzbekistan without confusing him with the minister of Tajikistan. It is finding that North Lawn Building, Room 17 doesn’t exist. You discover that the interpreter only knows Italian when you needed Spanish and the minister only knows Russian. It is diplomacy at its worst.”
—an unnamed veteran diplomat, asked by the New York Times’s Neil MacFarquhar to summarize the U.N. General Assembly.Russia to U.S.: You ban our people for corruption? We'll ban yours.
- tit On Friday, the U.S. government announced that they would enforce visa bans on 18 Russian officials who were tied to the arrest and death of corruption lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in prison after reportedly being denied medical coverage. The U.S., in making the announcement, claimed it was merely “complying with its legislative requirements.”
- tat On Saturday, the Russian government did almost exactly the same thing to the U.S., placing visa bans 18 officials, some of whom were tied to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the Bush administration, or with harsh interrogation techniques, including Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, David Addington. source
