Felicity Arbuthnot: Ambassador Ford Disgraces Diplomacy

Diplomacy is the conduct of relations of one state with another by peaceful means: Remember that "Crusade"? It is back, it seems, if it ever went away! On the 16th of September 2001, George W Bush announced, This Crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while! Six months later, that designated "dove" of the Bush Administration, General Colin Powell, gave an ultimatum to Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, demanding he be on board to topple the Taliban and "neutralize" al- Qaeda in Afghanistan. Powell, in testimony before a Commission investigating the September 11th attacks stated that, "We gave them twenty-four or forty-eight hours, and then I called President Musharraf and said, "We need your answer now, We need you as part of this campaign, this Crusade". Now, Robert S Ford, US Ambassador to Syria, has imaginatively resurrected the "Crusade" as diplomatic representative of a President who pledged, at Cairo University in June 2009: "I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world. America is not, and will never be, at war with Islam." In his article, "The Salvador Option for Syria," Michel Chossudovsky gives a crash course on the multiply diverse Ambassador Ford, to whom, it must be said, diplomacy would seem to be yet another far away land. However, even the insightful Professor Chossudovsky was unlikely to have foreseen that after Ambassador Ford slunk out of Syria in October last year, having indulged in ten months of provocative, divisive, inflammatory and politically confrontational actions!