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Diplomacy - Lift that veil?

The TV debate / discussion on CNN between Democratic candidates for the US presidency the other day highlighted the issue to whom, and how, dialogue ought to be had with governments of other countries. Talk openly to, say Iran, or do it all behind closed doors? Then again, should any discussion, open or otherwise, be held even if the US considers the "foreign" government abhorrent?

This is an issue and question taken up by John Nichols in a piece, "Clinton, Kissinger and the Corruptions of Empire" in The Nation:

"Of all the corruptions of empire, few are darker than the claim that diplomacy must be kept secret from the citizenry.

This hide-it-from-the people faith that only a cloistered group of unelected and often unaccountable elites – embodied by the nefarious and eminently indictable Henry Kissinger – is capable of steering the affairs of state pushes Americans out of the processes that determine whether their sons and daughters will die in distant wars, whether the factories where they worked will be shuttered, whether their country will respond to or neglect genocide, whether their tax dollars will go to pay for the unspeakable.

It allows for the dirty game where foreign countries are included or excluded from contact with the U.S. based on unspoken whims and self-serving schemes, where trade deals are negotiated without congressional oversight and then presented in take-it-or-leave-it form and where war is made easy by secretive cliques that are as willing to lie to presidents as they do to the people."

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