December 11, 2003 - Some of us, those who are older than dirt, remember the old Roadrunner cartoons.

Wiley B. Coyote was always setting elaborate traps to catch the Roadrunner that he can’t outrun. There were two that stick in my memory. In the first the Coyote posts a No Left Turn sign a twisting mountain road where the road makes a sharp left. He pursues the bird up the road - the Roadrunner ignores the sign.

The law-abiding Coyote speeds straight ahead – off the 1000 foot cliff, slows to a stop, looks in the camera and falls out of sight. In the second the Coyote paints a tunnel entrance on the sheer side of a mountain and pursues the bird toward it. He slams on the brakes as they get to the painted tunnel mouth and looks on in shock as the Roadrunner disappears into the painted tunnel. He stops, scratches his head, and then is flattened by the train that emerges with the bird at the throttle.

I thought of those this week with the Administrations series of foreign policy triumphs – triumphs that rank right there with the “good progress” we are making on the ground in Iraq. Last spring President Bush had his Secretary of State warn the nations that did not wish to rubber stamp his one man declaration of a crusade against Saddam that there would be a price to pay for their reluctance.
This week he had the Secretary of Defense, or rather the Deputy Secretary of Defense, exact that price – disqualification from contracting opportunities to rebuild Iraq.

Contemporaneously with the announcement that France, Germany, Canada, and Russia were being penalized the President dispatched his special envoy, James Baker to those same countries to try to get concessions from them on the debts that the nation of Iraq contracted prior to the war. Here comes the train!

At the same time the President announced his agreement with the leader of Communist China that holding a referendum letting the Taiwanese people express their opinions of the missiles trained on them from the mainland is a provocative act. When the President of the United States is seen standing by a totalitarian leader, giving him a 19 gun salute and then supporting him in trying to stifle free expression in a democratic election it does nothing to instill confidence in the President as the leader or a free and democratic world.

Newt Gingrich had it right, we are headed off a cliff, and not just in Iraq. If you listen carefully you can hear the “Beep Beep!”