Posted on 06/28/2002 11:54:27 AM PDT by knighthawk
CALGARY - The long-toed salamander (ambystoma macrodactylum), unlike your humble correspondent, enjoys full unfettered access to the woods of Kananaskis. If he is not yet the official mascot of the G8 summit, he ought to be. He is hard to find because he's approximately four to seven inches long, which by strange coincidence matches exactly the latest expert estimates of the amount of real news generated by this summit, though to date real news at this summit has proved a lot harder to find than the long-toed salamander. He is fond of nocturnal burrowing, and thus would make an excellent press officer for the Prime Minister, if he's not already on the payroll and hasn't got some of the Grand-Mère paperwork snuck away down his little hole somewhere. He has a visible yellow streak running down the entire length of his back from snout to tail, and so is easily confused with Bill Graham fielding a question on Yasser Arafat.
I did the long-toed salamander a disservice yesterday. I referred to him at one point as the "three-toed salamander," momentarily confusing him with the three-toed tree sloth of Central America who is unable to move faster than 0.15 miles per hour, but that's plenty fast enough to cover the ground between all the scheduled non-events at the summit. The bottom has dropped out of the anti-globalization protests. Or, to be more accurate, the bottom's dropped back in: the anti-glob mob have put their clothes back on. Meanwhile, in Kananaskis, the world's leaders insist they'll be sticking to their African agenda, no matter how many exciting new plans the White House launches on this or that in the longueurs between photo-ops with Thabo Mbeki.
For Bush, the Kananaskis summit is a better emblem for the state of the planet than even his hosts realize: the representatives of the free world holed up in a luxury resort surrounded by a wilderness of grizzlies, mountain lions and other predators. Of course, that symbolism -- the fragility of civilization -- only works if you take on board such Bush concepts as "liberty" and "barbarism," and, as we know, most of his G8 confreres have a more nuanced view, which is one reason he's ceased paying them any heed, as was made evident by his speech on Palestine.
The Bush plan on the Middle East and the Chrétien plan on Africa are not just differences in priorities but in fundamental approach. The NEPAD business is in the grand tradition of multilateral plans; the Palestine plan is really an anti-plan, a plan for those who don't like plans. Mr. Chrétien really thinks he can save Africa, and so do his chums at The Globe And Mail who hailed it last month as "a deal to pull Africa out of poverty." Mr. Bush is under no illusions that he brings peace to the Middle East and his plan is to have no plans on the subject until those involved get serious. He's not "imposing" "onerous" "conditions" on the Palestinians. His message to them is a simple one: No shirt, no shoes, no service. They're not conditions, only a statement of the obvious: It may be "up to the Palestinians" (as Chirac, Graham et al. insist) to choose their leaders but if they choose corrupt and duplicitous terrorism-facilitators like "Chairman" Arafat, there's no reason on earth why the United States should help them to statehood.
If Mr. Chrétien had decided to devote this summit to Palestine, he would have had a big plan brokered with the EU, he'd have flown in Arafat and Assad and Saudi "Crown" "Prince" Abdullah and a bunch of Arab League honchos -- and nothing would have come of it, because it would have been predicated on a fiction. The acronym for Mr. Chrétien's African plan -- NEPAD, pronounced "kneepad" -- could just as easily be applied to the Euro-Canadian approach to Mr. Arafat: If you spend enough time on your kneepads, the guy'll come round. He won't. Mr. Bush has seen the Arafat memo authorizing a payment of US$20,000 to the family of that last suicide bomber -- the one the Chairman supposedly "condemned." The President has made a statement of the obvious: You can't plan on a fellow like that. Mr. Bush's plan is, in fact, a superb explanation of why he doesn't have a plan.
No wonder his G8 colleagues and the rest of the all-plans-all-the-time set are furious with Bush. If the no-plan plan were to catch on with the international community, it'd be the end of summits like Kananaskis. That's why Bush didn't bother giving fellow leaders a heads-up about his speech or a glimpse of its contents. He knew that if he simply said what he thought about the subject that the rest of the gang would scramble to re-position themselves. On Tuesday, asked about the Bush speech, Mr. Chrétien said that he could not reply because he had not yet been briefed; by Wednesday, the Chrétien position had evolved: He now had no view one way or the other on Mr. Arafat. Tony Blair managed to come up with a form of words that left him looking less like an incompetent boob but which was essentially following the same trajectory: moving towards the American position but without appearing to.
Had Mr. Bush kept the no-plan plan to himself until today and quietly offered it to his pals around the table at Kananaskis, Chirac would have pronounced it unacceptable, Chrétien would have ummed and awed, Blair would have sought to find some middle ground, and the result would have been a compromise statement of utter worthlessness -- like the Commonwealth on Zimbabwe. Much better to pre-announce the plan, and give the other guys a few days to catch up. If they don't want to, what's the difference?
I fear Mr. Bush has called the bluff of summits like Kananaskis and their weird artificiality. Mr. Chrétien has pulled off a stunt the most sinister Eastern European politburos would have balked at: He's arranged a summit where the participants meet in one town and the media are obliged to cover it from an entirely different town two hours away. And the press are going along with the sham! I dropped in at the alleged Media Centre in Calgary to put my name down for the lottery to get on the bus to Kananaskis itself but I could find no government press representative who could tell me who I needed to speak to. In April, after I sent in my form, the RCMP apparently had some security concerns about me and demanded supplemental information -- my wife's maiden name, any speaking parts in school plays, suspicious magazine subscriptions, etc. I sent back all the info, turned up in Calgary, and discovered that my accreditation entitles me to nothing but a beige satchel with a complimentary Kananaskis mug and the right to enter a conference centre miles from where anything's happening and where no one's got a clue what if anything's going on.
To those correspondents with The Molotov Monthly and The North Bay Anarchist who were denied an accreditation badge, I say help yourself to mine, boys. I dropped it in a pot plant in a bar on Centre Street and anyone with a false beard is welcome to take it. I am free as a long-toed salamander, I have tossed away my kneepads.
Ping for the MSPL.
BUMP
Pokey thanks for the ping...
He left off the last line.....
HE SHOOTS! HE SCORES! YESSSS!
Out of all the paragraphs in this Steyn piece, those words leap out, don't they! That is exactly the President's message!
God, I love this guy!
I love that; "ceased paying them any heed"!! Mark Steyn hits the nail on the head again!
Bravo to Mark...once again he 'gets' GW and American plain talk better than the American talking heads on network television. The countries of the world must learn that just because we are prosperous does not mean that we have to give them our money. Let the Europeans keeps throwing their money down the toilet if they wish. We work hard for our money and we have better things to spend it on than Yasser Arafat and his murderous brethren.
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