I'm guessing that we can lay these at the feet of Dr. Rice. Finally, two specs of good news on the American geopolitical diplomatic front. TigerHawk is on the case.
Following a visit from a Bush administration Treasury Department official, Vietnam has closed its banking system to North Korea. This is the latest victory in a patient campaign to strangle North Korea's finances. According to the linked story, after the closing of Pyongyang's access to a bank in Macao last year, only Vietnam and Russia remained overtly willing to bank North Korean financial assets. Now there is only Russia.
Swish. Pure diplomatic victory by the Bushies. Nothing but net.
At least some conservatives are not happy that the United States has apparently granted a visa to former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. Actually, the wire services report only the application, but Stratfor says that it has been "processed"($). I suspect, however, that we would not even have heard about the application unless the State Department fully intended to grant it -- Khatami would not have run the risk of applying if acceptance had not been wired in advance. Khatami will speak at the National Cathedral as part of a conference on "Global Reconciliation."
Khatami is popularly thought to have been a "reformist," sufficiently so that the Clinton administration specifically decided against retaliating against the Khobar Towers bombing -- which occurred before Khatami's election in 1997 -- because it did not want to undermine him. American hawks disagree most vehemently. My own view is that the debate over Khatami's alleged reformist tendencies is all semantics. Khatami may have been inclined toward a somewhat more liberal conception of the Islamic Republic, but in the end he did not step up to support the reformists when they needed a leader. If he was a reformer, he was of the "best hockey player in Ecuador" variety.
I'm much more sanguine about Khatami, and I can specifically recall that he was the man who convinced me that our two nations could very well be partners. Maybe I was drinking Clintonade at the time (and it's true that I must have a strong stomach for Presidents with debilitating flaws) but I seem to recall that Khatami was an alright guy. What he was able to do in the face of his radical clerics was another thing but I'd give him a lot more credit than Ahmed Chalabi.
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