Obamas and the Zapateros at G20Obama and Spain's Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero will meet today and make statements to the press around 1 pm, according to Politico. I'll post video when it's available. Surprise! Relations with Spain under George Bush were not so good. Expect republicans to be watching closely because Zapatero is--gasp--a socialist, and apparently a prickly one at that. A little background:
Zapatero has tried, and failed, for several years to get some one-on-one face-time with a U.S. president. Zapatero, who is arguably the most anti-American leader in Europe today, was until now one of the only such Europeans never to have been invited to the White House.
Zapatero is the Prime Minister of the socialist government of Spain who just after his first election victory in 2004 recalled the Spanish troops from Iraq.
In 2003, when Zapatero was still the opposition leader, during the parade on Spain’s National Day on October 12th, he conspicuously remained seated when the American flag was passing by, and said “Why should I stand up? It’s not my flag?”
The flag incident was not merely an offense to the Bush administration at a time of a heated argument over the war in Iraq, but an insult to the American people as a whole.
Zapatero’s government also made efforts to sell aircraft and patrol boats to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and adopted a very soft policy on Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Last March, the Spanish socialist government also announced that it would withdraw its 630 troops from the NATO-led KFOR force in Kosovo. Americano
