Category Archives: Politics: International

Canadians are agitating to annex the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Yes, the Canadians are seeking a warm-water port:

“In the long term, what is so absolutely vital for Canada is to expand our sphere of influence,” says Conservative MP Peter Goldring, a driving force behind the Turks and Caicos movement.

Canadians seeking Lebensraum? Wait a minute…

“We had a sphere of influence in the Caribbean 100 years ago. Canada was a major shipper and transporter to the Caribbean from the Maritime provinces. We have lost that direct Maritime link with the Caribbean.”

Goldring has organized an all-party committee of Parliamentarians as well as a group of business leaders to lay the groundwork for a possible union between Canada and the Caribbean Island.

“I'd like it to be the 11th province,” Goldring says.

“It would be a Canadian province at the gateway to the Caribbean.”

Of course, being nice Canadians, they don't call it “annexing” but use words like “union” or “merger” or “free association” and even “overseas territory,” while contemplating “400 kilometres of white beaches and 800 kilometres of virgin reef for divers and snorkellers.” Plus temperatures that stay in double digits year round. Even in Centigrade.

If this “merger” happens would it signal a reversal of the trend towards increased devolution and the creation of micro-states? Could this start a trend?

And, how would the US react to being flanked by Canada?

Jack Pritchard, What I Saw in North Korea

On Jan. 8, North Korean officials gave an unofficial American delegation, of which I was a member, access to the building in Yongbyon where about 8,000 spent fuel rods had once been safeguarded. We discovered that all 8,000 rods had been removed.

Whether they have been reprocessed for weapons-grade plutonium, as Pyongyang claims, is almost irrelevant. American intelligence believed that most if not all the rods remained in storage, giving policymakers a false sense that time was on their side as they rebuffed North Korean requests for serious dialogue and worked laboriously to devise a multilateral approach to solving the rapidly escalating crisis.

Here's what George W. Bush had to say about this critical subject in the State of the Union:

Different threats require different strategies. Along with nations in the region, we're insisting that North Korea eliminate its nuclear program. … America is committed to keeping the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous regimes.

Well, I feel better now, don't you?

Cheney's grim vision: decades of war / Vice president says Bush policy aimed at long-term world threat

Oh heck. It's too depressing to contemplate just how awful this administration is. Even the politics of this elude me. Do they think that because polls right now show the incumbents as being more trusted on defense issues that the scarier the make the world sound the more votes (and Haliburtondollars) they get? Or is this honest belief? And which is worse?

I remember Bush's first post-9/11 speech, which I also saw in a hotel room, just as I'm in one now reading this. It was very upsetting. I was imagining my children being drafted and killed for his campaign against an ism. This sounds like the more intellectual version of the same thing. But now I'm more angry than upset.

Give me Dean, Clark, Edwards, even Kerry (uninspiring). Heck even Gephardt (unelectable) or Lieberman (unprincipled). Anything.