vorba dulce mult aduce (!!)
- From: komissaru <manassetecsico@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2007 16:37:22 -0700
Bush brings pre-emptive agenda to Europe By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated
Press Writer
1 hour, 50 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - New penalties against Sudan - check. More dollars to
fight AIDS in Africa - check. A respected internationalist to
lead the World Bank - check. Friendly words about tackling
global warming - check.
George Bush is ready to go to Europe.
His bag packed with a pre-emptive agenda he spent all week detailing,
the president leaves Monday on a trip that will take him to six
countries in eight days. Bush journeys from the Baltic Sea to the
Mediterranean, with the centerpiece of his travels a three-day summit
in Germany with leaders from Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia.
The president made certain not to arrive empty-handed.
"The operative phrase ... that sums up the week is when the president
said, `We are a compassionate nation,'" said Charles Kupchan, director
of Europe studies for the Council on Foreign Relations.
Most of Bush's presidency has been about "hard power" - fighting
terrorism and waging the Iraq war - and still is. But heading
into the Group of Eight meetings, he chose a different focus.
"He's cycling back to this nicer, kinder America," Kupchan said. "This
is an agenda that is much more popular in Europe than the talk about
fighting al-Qaida and chasing the Taliban through the mountains of
Konar province" in Afghanistan, on the eastern border with
Pakistan.
Over the past week, Bush:
_Announced his selection of Robert Zoellick to head the World
Bank. The choice won praise in Europe, which had pushed for an end to
Paul Wolfowitz's stormy tenure.
_Matched his impassioned rhetoric about what he decries as genocide in
Sudan's Darfur region with tougher U.S. action against some of those
blamed for the suffering.
_Urged Congress to renew his program to fight AIDS in poor African
countries. He requested $30 billion over five years, nearly twice the
amount being spent for the program's first five years.
_Proposed that the U.S. and the world's 14 other biggest polluters
spend the next 18 months deciding on a long-term global goal for
cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
In one speech, the president said, "Once again, the generosity of the
American people is one of the great untold stories of our time." He
also told foreign reporters, "We've got a very strong agenda that I'm
looking forward to sharing in the G-8."
It remains to be seen how this agenda will be received in
Heiligendamm, Germany, the seaside resort town hosting the summit. Yet
on Saturday, demonstrators hurled stones and flagpoles at police
during a protest by tens of thousands of people against the summit.
For Bush, there is a changing lineup among world leaders.
He faces a deep loss with the departure on June 27 of ally Tony
Blair, who is being succeeded as British prime minister by Gordon
Brown. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the summit host who has
been in office less than two years, has put a premium on strong
relations with the United States.
France just elected a new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who expressed
fondness for the U.S. during his campaign and has promised renewed
ties with Washington.
Bush has scheduled a get-acquainted meeting with Sarkozy on the
sidelines of the summit - along with a goodbye chat with Blair and a
much-anticipated session with Russian President Vladimir
Putin.
Even Italian Premier Romano Prodi, one of the few in the group without
a center-right government, has been careful to tend the relationship
with Bush. He rates a visit from Bush to his country after the
meeting.
"You do not have among the leaders there now the kind of the hostility
and the dismissiveness at the personal level that was apparent even
before Iraq," said Simon Serfaty, a senior adviser to the Europe
program at the Center for strategic and International Studies.
"Both sides of the Atlantic have essentially decided to call a
political truce," Kupchan said. "The Bush administration has
realized ... that there's no longer this `Are you with us or against
us?' And I think the Europeans have essentially moved off of boxing
Bush around the ears on Iraq."
These gathering often get overtaken by outside events. For instance,
there is the U.S. bombing on Friday of a Somalia village where Islamic
militants had set up a base and the situation in Lebanon, where
fighting rages between the military and militants in a Palestinian
refugee camp.
How everyone deals with Putin is a wild card.
Moscow and Washington are in an escalating war of words over a
proposed U.S. missile defense system in Eastern Europe, worsening
already frayed relations. But Putin has problems beyond Washington.
Sarkozy and Merkel have taken a harder line. Britain was rebuffed when
it sought the extradition of a Russian accused in the polonium
poisoning of a former KGB officer in London.
Bush's shift on climate change reverberated loudly in the days before
the summit. It is "difficult to exaggerate" the importance of the
issue to Europeans, Kupchan said.
But while welcomed cautiously overseas, Bush's proposal for
negotiations among nations that include developing energy guzzlers
like China, India and Brazil falls far short of the hard, huge
reduction targets Merkel is advancing for approval at the summit.
Bush envisions reaching for what the president's top environmental
adviser said were nonbinding goals.
The president's moves on Darfur, meanwhile, were more about trying to
push allies than impress them.
The unilateral penalties against Sudan are not too ambitious; they
target the financial transactions of three people and about 30
companies with suspected links to the violence.
But Bush also wants a U.N. resolution to pressure the Sudanese
government to lift its opposition to a U.N. peacekeeping force. He
will need his counterparts' backing to get it.
.................................
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gHxfGKjA1M
sa termina dupe ce canta fat lady ?!
.
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