What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  Bush foreign policy comes full circle.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security Council that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had told U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Saakashvili “must go.”

“This is completely unacceptable and crosses a line,” Khalilzad said.

In a crackling exchange of a type rarely seen since the end of the Cold War, Khalilzad asked Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin whether the Russians were seeking “regime change” in Georgia with the military operation they launched Friday. In response, Churkin objected to the disclosure of a confidential phone call between top diplomats and shot back that “regime change” was “an American expression.”

The term was one the Bush administration used to describe its goals in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Russia opposed. But Churkin said some leaders “become an obstacle” to their own people, and “some situations take courageous decisions with regard to the political future.”

“Sometimes there are democratically elected or semi-democratically elected leaders who do things which create grave problems for their countries,” he told reporters after the meeting. “So sometimes, those leaders should contemplate how useful they have become to their people.”