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President Bush will be remembered as a selective diplomacy leader in the history books. Months before the War on Iraq he tried to persuade the international community to believe Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. During this time there was no sense of diplomatic dialogue between Saddam's Iraq and the United States but only a public stern warning from the U.S. to clear the WMD or face invasion. We also see the same with the U.S. dealing with North Korea. It has been only in recent months that the United States took serious diplomatic engagement to bring the North Korean government back to the six party talks and deescalate the nuclear crisis for now. President Bush has continued his persistent "isolative" foreign policy to make our enemy states feel isolated from the United States, and we made significant success from his foreign policy. But we could have done better by actively engaging in diplomacy, which the Chinese has exploited and has been successful in terms of winning new key allies through the world.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Syria to reengage the diplomatic relations with the United States. Granted, it is not the House Speaker's constitutional role to engage in diplomatic efforts oversea, and I will agree that it might have damaged some of U.S. State Department's strategic Middle East efforts. However, the Speaker of the House was only following the 911 Commission Report to open up dialogue with the rouge states as the United States did the same with the Soviet Union during the Cold War era. Dialogue is crucial to stamp out superstitions and speculations between nations, and President Bush unfortunately pursued the other aisle of foreign policy, creating fear and in some cases unjustified panic in this country. The President can claim that our intelligence is sufficient enough to truly know what the other side is planning against the United States, and we should actively fight against such attacks before the United States suffers again. But do we as Americans want to risk another intelligence failure like the weapons of mass destructions in Iraq?

This is a trite ending, but keeps your friends close and your enemies closer.