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Answering a question about the U.S. relationship with Cuba in the aftermath of Fidel Castro during today’s press conference, President Bush equated Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL)”willingness to talk with foreign leaders (both allied and adversarial) to ‘embracing’ tyrants.”
Sitting down at the table — having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, ‘look at me, I’m now recognized by the President of the United States.’ Now, somebody will say, well, I’m going to tell him to release the prisoners.
Well, it’s a theory that all you got to do is embrace and these tyrants act. That’s not how they act. That’s not what causes them to respond. So I made a decision quite the opposite, and that is to keep saying to the Cuba books people, we stand with you. We will not sit down with your leaders that imprison your people because of what they believe. We will keep an embargo on you. We do want you to have money from people here in the homeland, but we will stay insistent upon this policy until you begin to get free.”
By Bush’s own logic, he himself has repeatedly ‘embraced tyrants.’ During a recent trip to the Middle East, Bush awarded Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, all of which received a “not free” or “partly free” rating from a recently released Freedom House report, with a $20 billion arms deal and avoided publicly criticizing the regimes’ poor political rights and civil liberties records.
In fact, according to a recent report in ‘Arms Control Today,’ a publication of the Arms Control Association “in the last six years, Washington has stepped up its sales and transfers of high-technology weapons, military training, and other military assistance” to tyrannical governments. “All that matters is that they have pledged their assistance in the global war on terrorism.”
Noting that U.S. aid is growing “at the same time as human rights conditions are worsening,” Stohl cites the example of Ethiopia, “which is carrying out a brutal counterinsurgency campaign within its own borders” and Nepal, whose security forces “opened fire on peaceful strikers and anti-government demonstrations.” Bush is also funneling millions into Uzbekistan, where thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned without due process and many tortured to death.
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CDI documented U.S. aid in foreign military, and direct commercial, sales to the 25 soared 400% over the five years prior to 9/11. This despite a 2006 U.S. State Department finding of “serious,” “grave,” or “significant” abuses committed by them against their own citizens.
Below are some pictures of President Bush embracing tyrants.
President Bush with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia
President Bush and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. On the far left sits Prince Abdullah Bin Abd Al Aziz of Saudi Arabia, and on the far right sits King Hamad Bin Issa Al Khalifa of Bahrain.
President Bush and President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan.
President Bush and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethopia.