[aaus-list] Dollars to donuts ...

[Walter R Iwaskiw]

The NYT article cited by Mr. Pyziur also presents some fairly compelling
reasons for Ukrainian-Americans, irrespective of party affiliation,
political preference, or opinion of President Bush, to support efforts
to grant Ukraine a NATO Membership Action Plan--which, incidentally, has
been endorsed by Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and
Barack Obama as well as Republican John McCain:  

The American position is supported by the newer members of NATO from
the old Eastern Europe, with Romanian, Estonian and Latvian leaders
emphasizing that MAP is a set of difficult requirements for NATO
membership, including internal political and military reforms and
guarantees of civil liberties, and can take a decade to fulfill.

“MAP is more of a big stick than a big carrot,” said the Estonian
president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, at a conference here of the German
Marshall Fund. “It forces nations to reform even when they don’t
want to do it.” The Latvian president, Valdis Zatlers, warned that
delay to MAP delayed crucial internal debates. “No action plan, no
action,” he said. “If we delay, we postpone the inevitable. We have
to give MAP.”

Ronald Asmus, who was a key figure in the Clinton administration’s
enlargement of NATO and now runs the German Marshall Fund’s Brussels
office, said that “Bush’s speech set up a dramatic battle that will
be fought out over the next two days and whose outcome will be important
in shaping his legacy, and America’s diplomatic standing in the
alliance.”

Mr. Asmus said that success was possible short of the Membership Action
Plan, but said that the summit needed to “send a strong enough signal
to the countries to deepen their reforms and to Moscow not to increase
its pressure on them.” Failure, he said, “would be a statement that
produces no pressure to reform and that Moscow reads as a pale green
light to ratchet up the pressure.”


>>> Max Pyziur <pyz at brama.com> 4/2/2008 4:25 PM >>>

... sez that Dubya just cinched the Uke-American vote for "Walnuts"
McCain 
by bullying France and Germany and lobbying for Ukraine and Georgia's 
entry into that li'l ole arms-dealing, war games-playing orgranization
by 
the name of NATO (rhymes w/ "PlayDoh"): 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html 

If the vote is close, do you think this will flip the result in favor
of 
"Walnuts?"

The odds of that are fill_in_the_blank ...

Go ahead, be brave.

What will the headlines on Wednesday, November 5, 2008 read? "Precincts
in 
the Ukrainian Village of Chicago swung heavily in the direction of
'Nuts 
as exit-polling data showed the local consistuency as being the
deciding 
factor ..."

MP
pyz at brama.com 
_______________________________________________
aaus-list mailing list
aaus-list at ukrainianstudies.org 
http://www.brama.com/mailman/listinfo/aaus-list