Word: haige
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Washington, Haig and the White House staff could at least avoid one another when they had no business to discuss. Thrown together on a tightly scheduled visit to Europe, they got into explosive quarrels over the pettiest matters. For example, Haig is said to have regarded it as an affront that the helicopter carrying him and his wife Patricia from Heathrow Airport outside London to Windsor Castle was far behind the Reagans' chopper. According to White House aides, he upbraided Clark and Baker on the lawn at Windsor Castle, while Queen Elizabeth II was welcoming Reagan. "He went crazy...
Clark believed that Haig had misrepresented the President's position, and he therefore set out to tighten restrictions on the pipeline. He called a meeting of the National Security Council in Washington on June 18-a day when, as he knew, Haig was scheduled to be in New York City conferring with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. At the urging of Clark, Weinberger and others, Reagan at the NSC meeting not only reaffirmed the original ban but ruled that U.S. companies could not permit their foreign subsidiaries, or foreign companies with American licenses, to make equipment for the pipeline...
More important, Haig at Versailles undertook a bit of well-intended diplomacy that failed. Reagan earlier had forbidden American companies to supply equipment for the Siberia-Western Europe natural gas pipeline, as a method of putting economic pressure on the Soviets in retaliation for the crackdown in Poland. He had reserved the option of imposing further sanctions if the Poles were not granted some greater measure of freedom. The Europeans were angry, regarding any American effort to block the pipeline as an attempt to wage economic war on the Soviet Union. They opposed economic sanctions both on principle-they...
...Haig was convinced that American sanctions would not then stop the building of the pipeline or cancel the European commitment to it. He thought he could satisfy Reagan's desire to be tough on the Soviets by getting the Europeans to pledge that they would limit government-subsidized loans to the U.S.S.R. and its Warsaw Pact allies. They understood him to promise that if such a pledge were written into the final Versailles communique, there would be no further American moves against the pipeline. The communique did contain a vague promise to study restrictions on loans to the East...
Increasingly isolated in the Administration on this point, Haig has argued vehemently against any open break with Israel for a year, since the Israeli air raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad in June 1981. In part, he believes that public criticism has the same effect on the stub born Begin that waving a red flag has on a bull: it only provokes him to still more outrageous behavior. Also, Haig believes that since the Israeli invasion has smashed the military power of the Palestine Liberation Organization, U.S. diplomacy has a chance not only to re-create an independent...