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Stardate
20020426.0520 (On Screen): All negotiations and diplomacy succeed. Every attempt always accomplishes something.
Or at least that's what you'd think from the press releases. They never say "Nothing useful happened; we were wasting our time." They always find something, anything, that they can point at which looks successful. The trick is to look at what it is, to see whether it's actually substantial or merely fluff. Case in point, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's visit with President Bush in Texas. In this case, for instance, there are two indications that "success" was a failure. (For Prince Abdullah, that is.)
First, after an extended meeting, Prince Abdullah was too busy to talk to reporters, and issued no joint-statement with Bush. Second, Bush announced as a success the fact that the two forged a "strong personal bond". Which means that Bush was successful in not giving away anything important to Prince Abdullah, which was as expected. Prince Abdullah apparently spent a lot of their time together haranguing Bush to try to get him to stomp on Israel, and Bush didn't agree to do so.
The talks were described as "warm". I wonder if they were actually "hot".
Update: In fact, the only concession anyone seems to have made was that Prince Abdullah promised not to use the "oil weapon". That was less than a surprise; it would hurt Saudi Arabia a lot more than it would hurt us.
Update: "America is a country that was based on justice and freedom and doing what's right. America should pursue those principles in its foreign policies," the crown prince told Bush, according to Abdullah's foreign policy adviser, Adel Al-Jubeir. Oh, now that's rich... Saudi Arabia is apparently the paragon of justice and freedom in the mid-east. Yeah, right.
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