Friday, October 31, 2003
Flag blunder embarrasses Pentagon
From the Guardian:
posted by Blicero : 10/31/2003 05:37:00 PM
Shortly after the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, confused Afghanistan with Iraq at a news conference, the US embassy in Bucharest had to apologise to the president of Romania, Ion Iliescu, for the Pentagon decorating his table with a Russian flag when he lunched with Mr Rumsfeld earlier this week.
Scheduled to join Nato in May next year and a member of the US-led coalition of the willing in Iraq, Romania is one of Washington's firmest European allies but in the past it was in Moscow's orbit.
Romanian officials moved quickly to play down the incident. "I don't believe that anyone can imagine that Mr Rumsfeld doesn't know who he is meeting," Mr Iliescu's spokeswoman told reporters.
In yesterday's gaffe, Mr Rumsfeld answered a question from a journalist on warlords in Afghanistan by talking about Kurdish peshmerga fighters in Iraq until it was pointed out that that was a different country.
"Oh, I'm sorry ... I was thinking of Iraq. No wonder I couldn't understand it," he explained.
He did however concede with a chuckle that the two countries were "close".
posted by Blicero : 10/31/2003 05:37:00 PM
