Pressing Questions
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr Pressing Questions There comes a time when a commentator has no answers, only questions. Will President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir V...
...President George Bush the elder continued that relationship and, at a 1990 Helsinki summit, elevated the Soviet Union to the level of "partner...
...Then he accepted a compromise education bill without school vouchers...
...The reason I was not surprised at the flip-flop is that President Bush, in his first months in office, has displayed an amazing agility in climbing down from unproductive campaign positions, no matter how ardently espoused...
...Will President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir V Putin remain best friends after the "consultations" on missile defense and nuclear arms reduction that they agreed to in Genoa...
...So, suddenly, while traveling in Europe, Bush set a two-year deadline to get out of Vieques, catching the Pentagon by surprise...
...Next came the Berlin crisis, followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...Roger Pedersen is moving to England...
...The alert was said to have been prompted by a communications interception, but Department officials reportedly knew nothing about when, where or how any attack might materialize...
...The indictment of 13 Saudis and a Lebanese on June 21, for bombing the Khobar Towers barracks five years earlier and killing 19 American servicemen, serves as ajarring reminder of the low-tech menace that exists even as we contemplate far-off hightech perils...
...Remember when Bush campaigned for school vouchers...
...That did not prevent Putin from summoning American correspondents two days later to warn that Russia would use multiple warheads on its missiles to overwhelm any shield devised without its concurrence...
...And President Bush may have learned a little bit more about humility...
...What was weird was that China's vote could do no good, since Russia had served notice all along that it intended to exercise its veto against the Anglo-American resolution tightening controls on oil and weapons smuggling...
...More recently, on July 18 to be precise, the State Department issued another warning of imminent terrorist action against the U.S...
...The tip had come from Edwin Wilson, a former CIA agent convicted of smuggling guns to Libya...
...For that matter, what happened to the budget surplus...
...Departing FBI Director Louis J. Freeh had said that these indictments were the last thing he wanted to accomplish before leaving office...
...The Chinese government insisted it was only improving civilian communications and charged a provocation reminiscent of the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade...
...Presidential Agility Another question, and this time an answer...
...But the chance that the indicted suspects will be extradited to the United States is slim...
...But the Wall Street Journal's conservative columnist Paul Gigot says, "Bush isn't one to go down in glorious principled defeat...
...These are pressing questions, I assure you...
...Bush won points by according Putin what every Russian leader yearns for—a public display of superpower respect...
...They stood side by side in front of crowds in Red Square as Reagan proclaimed thatthe Soviet Union was no longer an "evil empire...
...tour...
...For the Bush Administration, this latest confrontation of politics, science and religion has developed into a nightmare...
...It would release more than $80 million in frozen business deals, including an Iraqi contract with the same Chinese contractor who had been installing cable for the antiaircraft missile batteries...
...and NATO...
...Did China schedule the spy trial of a visiting American professor for July 14, the day afterthe site selectionforthe 2008 Summer Olympic Games, as a warning...
...But Bush campaigned on the promise to withdraw American troops from the Balkans and leave "our European friends" to do the heavy lifting in that violence-prone region...
...That put Soviet-American relations into deep freeze...
...Will China try to avoid trouble in the Taiwan Straits for the next seven years, remembering President Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...
...Perhaps President Bush imagined that his charm offensive would sway President Putin...
...I would provide the answers if only I could divine them...
...And Senator Bill Frist, a transplant surgeon, and a majority of Catholics, if not the Catholic hierarchy...
...The President does not always cave...
...Is campaign finance reform dead now and forever, or can it rise again...
...government warned of a "possible" (it sounded like "probable") terrorist attack on an American asset...
...After Gorbachev's ouster and the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Clinton enjoyed a backslapping relationship with Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia's first president, that chilled with Yeltsin's increasingly autocratic rule...
...In the current situation, I have no way of judging how solid the American intelligence on an impending attack was...
...Cole last October in Yemen's port of Aden...
...This may well be the right time for lowered rhetoric in the capital...
...Perhaps the most successful East-West relationship was forged between President Richard M. Nixon and lackluster Soviet Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev...
...Can a Wisconsin court constitutionally order a deadbeat dad sent to jail for violating a ban on his fathering children...
...President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to establish a personal bond with Prime Minister Aleksei N. Kosygin at a summit in Glassboro, New Jersey (chosen because it was midway between the United Nations in New York and the White House in Washington...
...He has so far stood firm on developing and deploying a missile defense system...
...Marine joint exercise with the Jordanian Army was canceled and the Marines returned to their amphibious vessels...
...To understand how the embryo issue has shaken up our political discourse you have to listen to antiabortion Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon...
...Or his getting involved in the Arab-Israeli crisis after saying there was no useful reason to do that...
...Huge oil supplies flowed through Turkey and Jordan...
...That is not to say it is unimportant...
...In February, a U.S.-British air strike was launched at fiber optics cables reportedly being installed by Chinese workers to improve air defenses in Iraq against overflying Allied planes...
...cowering in fear of barefoot bombers makes this superpower look superpowerless...
...Why wasn't I surprised when President Bush said that, as a NATO ally, he was not ruling out sending American troops to Macedonia to prevent a civil war there...
...And would the scholar, Li Shaomin, have been kept in jail rather than been deported if Beijing had not been chosen by the International Olympic Committee...
...Pitiful Giant However seriously one takes the threat of a rogue missile falling from the sky, it does not seem as real as some of the rogue terrorist activities on earth...
...This is about giving life to compassionate conservatism," he declared...
...5th Fleet anchored in Bahrain sailed hastily into the Persian Gulf...
...So the U.S...
...And the economic recovery...
...Back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who called Stalin "Uncle Joe" and hoped to inaugurate an era of post-Hitler East-West cooperation, American Chief Executives have tended to persuade themselves that their charm could accomplish miracles their bureaucrats could not...
...Weeks prior to his resignation in 1974, while the impeachment process was nearing its climax, he was visiting with Brezhnev in the Crimea and even discussing the scheduling of another summit in the United States...
...Then came the National Institutes of Health report that these would not offer all the advantages of fresh embryo stem cells...
...Escaping the Box When President-elect Bush proclaimed that he would "project our strength and purpose with humility," no one expected that to involve abject humiliation at the hands of Iraq...
...House Republican leaders Dick Armey and Tom DeLay found themselves in trouble with Vice President Dick Cheney for distributing a memo condemning Republicans who are willing to "rely on an industry of death...
...Terrorists seem to be able to send the American superpower into shudders simply by implying some impending attack...
...That did not sit well with Hispanic Americans, whose votes the Administration is courting...
...What about his embrace of the North Koreans he had first shunned...
...Remember when the President was adamantly opposed to energy price controls...
...and Britain abandoned their effort to draw up a more viable sanctions policy...
...A series of American missteps left the United Nations without effective control over secret weapons development and without the "smart sanctions"—controls on weapons and dual-use technology— that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had tried to install...
...The Administration had been hoping to straddle the issue by authorizing funding only for research using adult cells or existing embryonic cells...
...Then the littleknown Federal Energy Regulatory Commission imposed price controls that the White House, with its flair for euphemism, called "marketbased mitigation...
...France salivated for Iraqi manufacturing orders...
...Their relationship, initiated at a Geneva summit in 1985, reached fruition with Reagan's 1988 trip to Moscow...
...The burgeoning Bush-Putin relationship, symbolized by invitations to each other's homes, may so far be only a matter of atmospherics...
...Little did the President—or his political advisers—imagine that, when they took a position foursquare against supporting stem cell studies, they would find many of their natural right-to-life allies parting company with them...
...The Administration totally misread both Russia and China...
...Aides said that Cheney asked Armey and DeLay to tone down their rhetoric...
...But Putin never swayed...
...A U.S...
...One cannot foresee whether the BushPutin prénuptial agreement will survive when they get down to cases on NATO expansion and missile defense...
...Whatever happened to the sky-high gas prices and the rolling California blackouts that were confidently predicted for this summer...
...Iraq gleefully announced it was resuming oil exports, suspended for a month...
...But the development of this latest East-West romance in the rarefied atmosphere of the summit will be fascinating to watch...
...East-West Romances The burst of conviviality between Presidents Bush and Putin is the latest in a history of East-West summit romances, most of which ended badly...
...He stuck it out on tax reduction and substantially won his case...
...Nixon was invited to deliver a firstever television address to the Soviet people...
...in the Arabian Peninsula...
...Will the case of the missing Federal Bureau of Prisons intern, Chandra Levy, add a new literary dimension to the "Whodunit...
...Ships of the U.S...
...It is unlikely that the application was meant seriously, but Putin used it to signify an interest in joining NATO...
...Embryonic Dissent Dr...
...The State Department posted a general warning to Americans traveling in the region...
...genre—that is, the "Whodunwhat...
...And who will manage that triage...
...On the tape he recites a poem about "destroying a destroyer that fearsome people fear.' Within a few days, on what was described as credible evidence, the U.S...
...Putin, for all his Asia ploys and recent friendship treaty with China, has signaled that he sees Russia's fate as lying mainly in the West—the European Community, the U.S...
...With more multiple births resulting from the use of fertility drugs, will some babies in the future have to be sacrificed to save others...
...A videotape that turned up last month in Kuwait shows the fugitive Saudi terrorist chief, Osama bin Laden, boasting about the bombing of the destroyer U.S.S...
...Iraq was successful in manipulating the flow of oil and trade for maximum pressure against sanctions...
...Some settled assumptions about the connection between biology and politics are showing signs of crumbling...
...Not if he can find a way out...
...True, President Bill Clinton had been widely criticized for publicly barring the use of American ground forces in Kosovo...
...Yet the net effect— with no terrorist investment other than a few floated messages—has been to make the United States look like a pitiful, helpless giant...
...Pro-life means helping the living as well...
...The 1955 "Spirit of Geneva," where President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced Nikita S. Khrushchev to the martini cocktail, evaporated with the Soviet crackdown on Hungary a year later...
...In short order the FBI personnel investigating the Cole attack were withdrawn from Yemen and the American Embassy was closed...
...President Ronald Reagan, in his second term, became good friends with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev...
...Ike's attempt at personal diplomacy was revived with the 1959 "Spirit of Camp David," the summit meeting that climaxed Khrushchev's tumultuous U.S...
...But the four-power Paris summit of 1960 and a planned Eisenhower trip to the USSR (where a golf course was already being built) collapsed with the shooting down of a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union...
...The picture of the U.S...
...Khrushchev's flirtation with President John F. Kennedy (for whom he jokingly offered to campaign) broke off early at the 1961 summit in Vienna...
...He is going from the University of California, San Francisco, to the University of Cambridge, England...
...Senators Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond along with Nancy Reagan, for example...
...When the time came to solicit China's UN Security Council vote for sanctions against Iraq, the Bush Administration offered a sweetener...
...Before President Jimmy Carter could attempt to establish a personal relationship with Brezhnev, the USSR invaded Afghanistan...
...There was no hit squad and Colonel Muammar Qaddafi must have enjoyed a good laugh...
...Now we have apparent love at first sight between President Bush the younger and KGB veteran Vladimir Putin...
...In England, funding the promising field is no problem...
...I am reminded of 1982, when intelligence reports about a Libyan "hit squad" on its way to assassinate President Reagan in reprisal for the shooting down of two Libyan jet fighters triggered a massive security operation, including the placing of concrete slabs in front of the White House...
...They signed arms control pacts, including the Antiballistic Missile Treaty of 1972...
...Saddam Hussein is now out of the box that the senior President Bush put him in at the end of the GulfWar lOyears ago...
...Remember when the President held the Navy's firing range in Vieques, Puerto Rico, to be indispensable until a substitute could be found...
...And would it help if the House were to vote in secret like the International Olympic Committee...
...Pedersen is one of the pioneers on the frontiers of embryo research...
...But the "Spirit of Glassboro" did not survive the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968...
...Presumably the military authorities knew what they were doing...
...And where does judicial control over the right of reproduction end...
...It did not get much play when Putin, reading from what he called a declassified secret memorandum during his joint news conference with Bush in Slovenia, revealed that the Soviet Union had applied for NATO membership as early as 1954—and been turned down...
Vol. 84 • July 2001 • No. 4
