{"id":266,"date":"2004-10-17T18:23:51","date_gmt":"2004-10-18T01:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=266"},"modified":"2004-10-17T18:23:51","modified_gmt":"2004-10-18T01:23:51","slug":"oh-dear-georgie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2004\/10\/17\/oh-dear-georgie\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh, Dear Georgie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><I>One congressman &#8212; the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress &#8212; mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.<\/p>\n<p>&#8221;I don&#8217;t know why you&#8217;re talking about Sweden,&#8221; Bush said. &#8221;They&#8217;re the neutral one. They don&#8217;t have an army.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: &#8221;Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They&#8217;re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.&#8221; Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.<\/p>\n<p>Bush held to his view. &#8221;No, no, it&#8217;s Sweden that has no army.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The room went silent, until someone changed the subject. <\/i><\/p>\n<p>[<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/10\/17\/magazine\/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=print&#038;position=\">&#8220;Without A Doubt&#8221;, by Ron Suskind, The New York Times Magazine, October 17 2004<\/a>] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One congressman &#8212; the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress &#8212; mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall. &#8221;I&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-foreign-affairs","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-4i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}