Wooing the backyard crowd

It is indeed a sign of our troubling times and this troubling administration that, while the Pentagon busies itself with blowing up goatherds in Somalia and promising more of the same, while Bush amps up the war in Iraq and further threatens Iran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is off on a whirlwind diplomatic tour of Latin America, where he will visit Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua.* All of these countries are represented by either recently elected or re-elected social democratic, i.e. leftist, governments and none of them are inclined toward a friendly disposition regarding the Bush administration.

Yes, the government of Iran is running diplomatic circles around this White House and the utterly incompetent Condoleezza Rice, while Bush mires this country further in its Middle East morass, threatening everything and everyone around.


* For an excellent review of Reagan administration transgressions against Nicaragua, I highly recommend Sandinista Redux, by Michael Niman, in this month's The Humanist, Vol. 67, No. 1. Sorry, you'll have to find it on paper.