| Republicans respect Russia Yesterday, delegates to the ongoing US Republican Party convention in New York approved George W. Bush as their candidate for president. Now the convention convinces America that only Bush can lead the country in wartime. "Every day I wake up asking myself how best to protect America," President Bush said yesterday. And he unexpectedly made a statement that it was impossible to completely defeat terrorists: “I don’t think it’s possible to win this war. But it is possible to create conditions under which those who resort to terrorism are increasingly rejected by the world.”
Democratic rivals took advantage of this clause. Winning the war is “absolutely possible,” says presidential candidate John Kerry. And the controversy itself spilled over into the meeting room of the Republican Congress. “The United States had no choice but to invade Iraq,” Vietnam veteran Senator John McCain said from the podium. And he attacked the “hypocritical director” Michael Moore, who “proved otherwise” in his documentary “Fahrenheit 9-11.” Delegates booed the filmmaker as he sat in the press box, chanting, “Four more years.” “Only two months,” the director shouted to them. The presidential elections will take place in two months, on November 2.
Reminiscent in spirit of the times of the USSR (there is a palace of congresses, and thousands of delegates, and a single candidate), the congress approved the party’s political platform on Monday. It declares a “comprehensive strategy for winning the war against terrorism.” And it sounds - with a hint at the DPRK and Iran - a determination to prevent “the most dangerous regimes from possessing the most dangerous types of weapons.”
One section of the program is devoted to relations with Russia: “The United States and Russia are no longer strategic adversaries.” The document contains words of support for President Bush, who “rightly emphasizes cooperation with Russia,” including “further development of the already existing broad cooperation in the war against terrorism.” “This is a thoughtful document and a real program of action for the ruling party in the United States,” Sergei Oznobishchev, director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Assessments, told Vremya Novostei yesterday. The friendship with Russia recorded in the program cannot but please the Kremlin. Although, as Mr. Oznobishchev emphasized, “on the part of Moscow, good relations with Washington are actually based only on the personality of President Putin, since partnership with the West is unpopular among the Russian elite.” Andrey ZLOBIN |
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