CNN.com - Rice: U.S., Europe partners in freedom - Feb 8, 2005

CNN.com - Rice: U.S., Europe partners in freedom - Feb 8, 2005

Once again, the cunningness of the US administration. After alienating everyone, the Bush White House is now going to show an attempt at mending fences. In her recent trip around Europe and the Mideast, Sec. Condi Rice has shown the ever soft velvet glove over Bush's iron fist. She took up the impossible task to mitigate the US' arrogant foeign policy goals, and frankly did as good a job - if not better - as anyone could.

The bully wants to show some compassion and that's fine, it's about time. But the US needs to stop thinking that the slate is ever totally clean. That is their constant mistake. They want to argue policies in a vacuum, disregarding the effects of past disdainful and imperialistic US policies on people around the World. Americans can do that, because most of the time they were not aware of what their government did. But the people - and I mean the people, not the corupt leaders they maintain in power - in Iran, Iraq, Palestine-Israel, Congo, Angola, Chile, Cuba, Mozambique, Saudi Arabia or the broader Mideast, who still suffer the effects of those policies will not that quick to forgive. Forgiveness is earned, and starts with ackmoledgement of guilt. The US government cannot even fully acknowledge the devastating effects it had on some segments of its own population -Blacks, Native Americans, Hawaians - let alone people outside it. If they cannot show the example of human rights in their own policies and actions (i.e:racial profiling, Abu-Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, military coups in Chile and other places in Latin America, petty policies towards Cuba, disregard and disdain for the UN and the Geneva conventions, refusal to react to the Rwandan genocide, Somalia or Darfur), how do they expect people to believe in them as anything other than a neo-colonial imperialistic bully? I wonder...