5 ex-State secretaries blather on

Five former secretaries of State gathered in Georgia yesterday to do what secretaries of State do best – use a lot of words, point fingers and offer no real solutions (Washington Times link);

Five former U.S. secretaries of state today urged the next presidential administration to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and open a dialogue with Iran.

[…]

Each of them said shuttering the prison camp in Cuba would bolster America’s image abroad.

“It says to the world: ‘We are now going back to our traditional respective forms of dealing with people who potentially committed crimes,'” said Colin Powell, who served as President Bush’s first secretary of state.

Powell was joined by Henry Kissinger, James Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, who sat in a round-table discussion sponsored by the University of Georgia at a sold-out conference center in downtown Athens.

OK, that’s all well and good – close Guantanamo. So what do we do these cretins we have locked up there? (insert chirping sounds here) Diplomats are always so good at telling us what “looks bad” but they can’t offer solutions. And where were they all when Bill Clinton stashed thousands of Haitian refugees in Guantanamo under worse conditions than the terrorist thugs living there now?

Henry Kissinger got a little testy when the topic changed to China;

“We should not look at China as a military adversary,” said Kissinger, adding that a military confrontation is unlikely. “We should see where we could cooperate.”

Has Henry paid any attention to what’s happening in the world and seen the evidence that China is behind nearly every bad thing? China has it’s fingers in Hugo Chavez’ pie, Ahmadinejad’s business, they hold sway over North Korea and the Myanmar government. There’s evidence that China and North Korea were helping Syria build nuclear weapons. they knocked our plane out of the sky over international waters, for pete’s sake. China sold both India and Pakistan their nuclear technology. How would you describe a military adversary, Henry?

Category: Foreign Policy, Politics, Terror War