Moo, Eh?

All this blog has to say about this is "It's about bloody time." It was one damned cow, for (insert saviour's name here)'s sake.

On a more serious note, the American ban on Canadian beef is just another instance of the absolutely shabby treatment of Canada by the Bush administration. Three years in, he's still snubbing Canada (unlike his predecessors, he has yet to make a trip to Canada, the U.S.'s largest trading partner, even though previous presidents generally made Canada their first state visit) for reasons that seem nothing more than childish. Forgetting to mention Canada after 9/11 in the State of the Union address, the country that took in 90% of the planes destined for American airports-- even though Dubya could find ways to thank Panama? Oy. This not to mention the many, many other intentional snubs by the US government toward Canada: relations between the two countries haven't been this strained at least since the late 1960s. This is disgusting. And flurking unnecessary.

In today's NYTimes, Thomas Friedman writes that "Many Europeans really do believe that a dominant America is more threatening to global stability than Saddam's tyranny." There are, sadly, damned good reasons why Europeans (and Canadians, and much of the rest of the world) think a dominant America is more threatening to global stability than Saddam's regime. For my American readers: with all due respect, your governments of the past fifty years have been as adept with foreign policy as I am with neuroscience. Check out Graham Greene's The Quiet American: Pyle, as a personification of American foreign policy, is gallingly blinkered though generally well-meaning and stunningly oblivious to his own hypocrisies. And yes, many in the Western world do look at the US as Fowler looks at Pyle, as a likeable and earnest enough fellow who really has no idea how dangerous he is to those around him. I'm sorry, my American friends, but this indeed is one of the international legacies of five decades of abominably clumsy foreign policy (c.f., Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Grenada, North Korea, Libya, Angola, Vietnam, Somalia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Liberia, to say nothing of the tendency to offend and to isolate even 'friendly' nations like France, Germany, South Korea, and Canada). With that track record, no wonder the world doesn't especially believe the US a 'stabilizing' force, or even an overly benevolent one: the US is a lot like Victor Frankenstein, on the verge of creating a monster that no one can ultimately control, a monster of which Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein may only be accidental prototypes.