The Nastiest Man on Earth

Bald, fat, ugly, with a defective heart (in every sense of the term), spiteful, sly, crude in intellect and analysis, Richard Cheney must be the real bogey man. In the frustration of declining power, both for the administration he has guided and the country he has so let down over the last eight years, he has mouthed off in Europe in the most unforgivably arrogant fashion.

There are well-founded and increasingly sharp differences between the member-states of the European Union and the United States of America over the oil and gas resources of the Caucasus, Russia's hegemony over their delivery to the rest of us, and Russia's relations with its former satellites and, consequently, with the European Union to which some of those satellites now subscribe.

The notion that because Poland and the Czech Republic have agreed to provide American missile sites this will lead to the installation of American missiles on Russia's borders is on a par with Kruschev's belief that Cuba's agreement to Soviet missile sites would lead to the installation of Soviet missiles on United States' borders. Any attempt to deliver those missiles will result in the same stand-off and the same turning back. Not in mid-ocean perhaps, more likely in mid-air, for it is hard to imagine their transport across the central European plains of Germany.

Bluntly there is not a global strategy for a single super-power to pursue; there never was, but the Cheney-led strand of American ideology wanted it to be so. There are international relations, as there always were, governed mostly by brute force but with all those of morality and good will attempting to install and observe some level of international law - law that in his years of power Cheney and his ilk have undermined, and ignored, and flouted with illegal wars, torture, and the setting aside of the Geneva Conventions.

Cheney may turn up in person to brief his puppet in Georgia, who he misled into an act of provocation that has resulted in the dismemberment of the country, he may wring his hands in the Ukraine where his weasel words have split the government and released the Crimea into near, self-declared autonomy and Russian protection, but he cannot turn up in Italy and spit the venom of his frustration at us as if we do not understand what and who he is. All he can do is send an American Mediterranean Fleet battleship into a Georgian port in defiance of international accords on who might enter the Black Sea, and look foolish as the Russians ignore benignly this childish display of unusable force.

Mr Barroso, diminishing the role of the US in resolving the conflict in Georgia, told the Financial Times: “The hope for peace is the EU....I’ve not seen any proposals coming from any parts of the world apart from the peace proposal put forward by president Sarkozy on behalf of the EU...We are interested in having constructive relations with Russia. It is important to note what we need. We need cool heads, not a cold war and this is the basic message.” Responding to Russia’s unilateral recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Mr Barroso noted that article six of the plan provided for diplomatic discussions over their status.

Go away Mr Cheney; your policies are as unwelcome and wrong here as they are on your own continent.