The commentariat have been churning over President Obama's quick and not overly warm handshake with an 82-year-old Latin strongman who, more than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, would merit no attention if his name weren't Raul Castro. It's not a Middle East issue as such, but our region
has a history of awkward handshakes, as I've noted before. There was the painful Giraud-de Gaulle handshake at Casablanca in 1943, where you can imagine FDR and Churchill holding figurative guns to their heads:
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yNOIvkY2sPc/UO9eYvHSNqI/AAAAAAAAFNM/TLCGdBRDY44/s400/220px-Degaulle-freefrench.png)
Then there was Arafat and Rabin, where only Bill Clinton looks relaxed:
Or when Obama met Qadhafi in 2009 in Italy, two years before he bombed him out of office and helped his people put an end to him:
![](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z9bKJJbjUZ4/UQGJvFC6c4I/AAAAAAAAFd0/5Yt9Jht5ppQ/s400/OBAMAQADHAFI.jpeg)
But for those who see Obama and Raul as proof positive of Obama's radicalism, please chew on this one for a while:
For the young ones among you, that is Fidel Castro and Richard Nixon.
Enough said.
1 comment:
Let's not forget the memorable hand shake between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein in March 1984, shown here by The National Security Archive:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/
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