Means, Not Ends, at Issue in U.S. Policy

[Khephra]

WASHINGTON -- Foreign nations and their citizens often agree with U.S. policy goals -- an Iraq without the brutal Saddam Hussein, a Haiti without the ineffective and increasingly corrupt President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

But they often don't agree with the Bush administration's go-in-first and alone, and talk-with-friends later approach to achieving those goals. In short, they agree with the ends, not the means.

Bush officials dismiss the criticism, but Caribbean nations added their voices this week to the earlier chorus of countries that have criticized the United States for high-handed, unilateral actions, from Iraq last year to Haiti this year.

On Thursday, more than a dozen Caribbean nations rejected joining any peacekeeping force for Haiti and called for an international, independent investigation into the ouster of Aristide, a democratically elected leader.

snip...........

"There is a democratically elected president in Venezuela that I'm not sure the administration likes very much," Crocker said. "And I think they might look at what happened in Haiti and think maybe there is some possibility" that the United States might take the same position in Venezuela.

more.................

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-bush-foreign-criticism,0,1120392.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[izzie]

1. That should really make Bush and Co Mad.

Little islands standing up to him? I have only read history as a general classes in college and high school so I am not really in the know but it seems to me that I recall all empires seem to hit a place where something stops them.General thinking tells us we are not an empire but even if we do not call it that, we seem to be one, We are controlling a good part of the world , so what else would you call it? Now what will our down fall be? From out side , with a thing like that, or from inside with us spending our selfs out? I think it takes both but most empires seem to go down from the inside, I think.

[w4rma]

4. The US isn't an empire. But a few international corporations are using us

to build THEIR empires, imho. And now these corporate empires are dumping us (outsourcing, tax evasion, etc.).

[La_Serpiente]

2. hmmm

Hundreds of opponents of President Hugo Chavez marched Thursday to demand the release of 350 people they say were arrested in days of rioting. The unrest in Venezuela, the world's No. 5 oil exporter, was sparked when a national elections council turned down a petition calling for a vote to recall Chavez.

Was it hundreds? Or thousands? The news reports some different number almost every time.

[displacedtexan]

3. Thousands (100K) marched in support of Chavez.

We rarely get the real story.