BUSH-PUTIN GETTING ALONG

[TAP]

The meeting went very well as reported by ABCNEWS: http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/p...ech010617.html

[Ronald_Barbour]

I remember in college history class many years ago about the importance of personality in history. For instance, without Hitler no Nazi Party or Second World War, or Israel for that matter...

If the reports are right concerning Putin and Bush the USA -Russian relationship may take a more positive course than would have been the case had the two leaders had a personality conflict.

And the course of history changed?

[kyrie]

Much good can come, if complacence is resisted.

k.

[mastodon]

Republican and Democratic senators, including influential conservative Jesse Helms, criticized U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday for his quick, positive judgment of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Bush, after a meeting with Putin in Slovenia last Saturday, said he considered the Russian leader "straightforward and trustworthy." As a gesture of trust, Bush invited Putin to visit him at his Texas ranch.

Helms, a North Carolina Republican, said: "Mr. Putin is far from deserving the powerful political prestige and influence that comes from an excessively personal endorsement by the President of the United States."

"Prematurely personalizing this relationship only undercuts the incentives he has to reorient Russia's domestic and foreign policy goals," Helms told Secretary of State Colin Powell at a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, shared Helms's concerns about the label "trustworthy."

The chairman of the committee, Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, said on Sunday that he personally did not trust Putin. He did not bring up the subject on Wednesday. Powell, answering the charges of a rush to judgment, told the committee that Bush "did not blink" in Slovenia.

"Let's put it in perspective. This is a president who walked into the room with that gentleman (Putin) and met him for the first time and laid down his markers," he said. Bush spoke his mind to Putin on missile defense, Chechnya, the rule of law, weapons proliferation, and the constraints of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, Powell commented.

"There was nothing off terra firma about the president's performance... He went there strong, he came out strong. He made it clear what he believed in and what he stood for and he didn't blink in the slightest," he added.

Helms said he had criticized officials of the former Clinton administration for making remarks similar to Bush's.

"We must not forget that under Mr. Putin's leadership, the press has once again felt the jackboot of repression, arms control treaty obligations remain unfulfilled and violated ... and a brutal indiscriminate military campaign in Chechnya continues unabated," the senator added. But Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, supported Bush's performance.

"I put some confidence in the president's personal analysis and I take the president at his word, but more important than that, it seems to me he placed some expectations on this relationship between the two of them, and I don't find that altogether that disturbing," he said.
//Reuters