How Quickly We Forget

2:06 pm EST April 6th, 2007 | News | 5 Comments

All manner of instant experts have been beating their chests and deriding the British for their negotiation with the Iranians over their sailors. But back in 2001 the Bush administration did its own sort of negotation.

THE 11-DAY crisis between the the United States and China ended early today after the Chinese accepted a letter with two “very sorrys” and freed the crew of the US spy plane.

At Haikou airport on Hainan island, the 24 Americans, all in uniform, flew out of China at dawn on a commercial jet chartered by the Pentagon. They were due to arrive in Hawaii later today. There they will be extensively debriefed about the collision, which crippled their plane and cost a Chinese fighter pilot his life, before returning to the US. The fate of the plane – which is standing, extensively damaged, at the Chinese airbase where it landed on 1 April – remains in doubt. Talks will begin on 18 April and will also consider regulations on US reconnaissance flights in the region to prevent another such incident in the future.

The diplomatic log jam broke with the delivery of a letter in China the night before, signed by US ambassador James Prueher, that stressed the “sincere regret” felt by President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, for the Chinese pilot’s death. It said the US was “very sorry” about the pilot and for “entering China’s airspace” and landing “without verbal clearance”.

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5 Responses to “How Quickly We Forget”

  1. Dugger says:
    April 6, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    Let me help.

    The Brits are being derided not just for negotiating but for claiming that the sailors were not in Iranian waters and then apparently negotiating. See. They claimed they were completely in the right, let Iran seize their sailors and then ‘negotiated’ for their release.

  2. merlallen says:
    April 7, 2007 at 6:55 am

    didn’t chickengeorge have to go to China and get on his knees and beg?

  3. Mark says:
    April 7, 2007 at 7:59 am

    What negotiations?
    Nothing was given for the release of the prisoners. In fact today the Iranians are asking for favours of which have been refused.

    Talking to Iran to release prisoners is not negotiating.

    Iran got nothing and in fact after we have heard the UK service men and womans story, I would say it is the Iranians that will lose out.

    The media have controlled this story, both in Iran and then our own media, actually believing what the Iranians said. They are home now alive, nothing given.

    The response from some people in the USA has been shocking considering we are in Iran helping Bush fight his war.

    140 service men have given thier lives, including the ones that USA forces killed in so called friendly fire.

    Breakdown Insurance

  4. Diamond LeGrande says:
    April 8, 2007 at 9:29 am

    The China incident always encapsulated for me the way the media waits on bended knees for Bush. They gave the cheer that the airmen were all safe, which is canard since there’s no way in hell the Chinese would provoke an escalation by harming the airmen. What they forgot to mention was that the Chinese sent the plane, which contained secret spy tech, home in a box a few months later, meaning that Bush basically gave the Chinese American spy technology.

    Maybe negotiations for the plane were doomed from the start, but Bush failed to thwart the real danger, and nobody in the MSM said anything.

  5. pedromd07 says:
    April 8, 2007 at 11:00 am

    alright enough unfettered liberal tripe…how about the real story. The EP-3 incident has virtually no relationship to the brits

    The aircraft was struck in international airspace by a chinese aircraft. It had to make an emergency landing somewhere (many though they should ditch at sea, another argument for another time). Once they made the landing, the US is now dealing with another superpower, not someone who says all jews should be exterminated and that the holocaust never happened.

    Further, the Chinese didn’t “send the plan home”, the US came and got it. We had a team of engineers out there for weeks disassembling the thing and shipping it back to the states.

    So Bush didn’t doom negotiations, and this event has no relation to the current one.