Irrelevance -- thy name is G-8

By Aussiegirl

Was there ever a more out of touch and useless summit ever held? While terror bombs go off in London and jihadists declare "Death to the West" -- the G-8 natter on about global warming and poverty in Africa as they hold hands and preach "an alternative to hate". (Watch out -- they're going to be buying the whole world a Coke next!)

Tell that to the terrorists who blew up 4 trains and a bus yesterday. While these morons held an 8 hour "summit" with the unwashed brain-dead Bob Geldof and the mono-nomial Bono, killers plotted and killed scores of their citizens.

This G-8 meeting may very well go down in history along with Nero's fiddling while Rome burned (OK- he probably didn't really do it but it's a great metaphor) and Chamberlain's proclaiming "peace in our time" as one of the more outrageous examples of political futility and impotence -- and outright fecklessness.

What this summit exposes is that the leadership of the world is not facing reality and is more concerned with posturing and preening on the world stage while making backdoor deals involving millions of dollars -- make that billions.
President Bush should never have even agreed to attend such a useless bit of puffery and tom-foolery.

World leaders wrapping up an economic summit shaken by terrorism agreed Friday on an "alternative to the hatred" -- aid packages for the Palestinian Authority and Africa and a mere pledge to address global climate change.

"We speak today in the shadow of terrorism, but it will not obscure what we came here to achieve," British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the summit host, said to close the three-day gathering.

"It isn't all that everyone wanted but it is progress -- real, achievable progress."
With a last-minute pledge from Japan, Blair won a key victory, announcing that aid to Africa would rise from the current $25 billion to $50 billion.

Blair ticked off a list of accomplishments from a meeting that nonetheless produced less than he had hoped going in.

Aside from the massive increase in aid for the African continent, leaders signaled support for new deals on trade, canceled the debt of some of the world's poorest nations, pledged universal access to AIDS treatment, committed to a peacekeeping force in Africa and heard African leaders promise to move toward democracies that follow the rule of law, he said.

"All of this does not change the world tomorrow -- it is a beginning, not an end," Blair said, with President Bush and the other G-8 leaders and the leaders of five African nations standing behind him. "And none of it today will match the same ghastly impact as the cruelty of terror. But it has a pride and a hope and humanity at its heart that can lift the shadow of terrorism and light the way to a better future."

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo thanked the leaders for focusing on Africa and for "their resolve not to be diverted by these terrorist acts."

Blair said the Palestinian aid package would total $3 billion "in the years to come." The British leader said the assistance was designed "so that two states, Israel and Palestine, two peoples and two religions can live side by side in peace."

The leaders failed to overcome stiff resistance from the Bush administration to launching a more aggressive attack on global warming.

Describing the agreement on climate change, Blair said merely that the plan of action "will initiate a new dialogue" between the summit countries and leaders from developing economies who also met with them.

The leaders, struggling to keep to their mission in the aftermath of deadly bombings that rocked London's rush hour on Thursday, shortened the final day of their summit to allow Blair to rush back to lead a government panel dealing with the blasts.

Hastily backfilling the obvious disconnect between the reason for the summit and reality on the ground, an army of hacks and clerks was mobilized to tack on a cobbled-together afterthought for the consumption of the masses "And -- oh, yeah -- we discussed terror too."

Also reflecting the London attacks, the series of summit communiques were to include a beefed-up section on terrorism. Aides to the leaders worked late into the night on this document, which was described as a progress report on what their countries are doing in the global war on terrorism.

Within hours of the London bombings, Bush and the other leaders issued a special joint statement that condemned "these barbaric acts."

Gee -- that's scary and original!

"We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism that is not an attack on one nation, but on all nations and on civilized people everywhere," the leaders said.
In his closing statement Friday, Blair said:
"There is no hope in terrorism, nor any future in it worth living. And it is hope that is the alternative to this hatred, so we offer today this contrast with the politics of terror."

Meanwhile, even though Bush managed to hold off agreement on the Kyoto Treaty they did reach some namby-pamby feel-good sop for general consumption. The logic here is -- we don't really know anything for sure -- but we know enough to act. Would that they would apply that logic to seeking out terrorists in their own midst.

Still, supporters of more aggressive action said that the United States had agreed to a document that stated "while uncertainty remains in our understanding of climate science, we know enough to act now." French President Jacques Chirac called that compromise language a "visible, real evolution" in the American position.