Posted on 06/28/2005 8:40:46 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
From the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to the Financial Times, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is being hailed for her latest public scolding of America's Arab allies.
In what columnist David Ignatius calls the "signature line" of her speech at the American University in Cairo, Rice declared:
For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course.
What is it about Rice's speech that makes it so off-putting and irritating?
First, in treating friends, common decency and diplomacy – and the Good Book, as well – teach us that private admonition is preferable to the public declamation, which is often the mark of the hypocrite.
Second, Rice's public scolding fairly reeks of moral arrogance. Unlike my purblind predecessors, Rice is telling us, my president and I are moved by a higher, nobler cause. While we fight for democracy for Arabs and Muslims, my predecessors, going back to World War II, were only interested in "stability." Thus, they all failed.
The claim is absurd. For Rice's predecessors had to conduct foreign policy during a Cold War in which freedom was at stake and under siege from the greatest enemy the West had known since the Islamic armies invaded France in the eighth century.
Thirty years ago, during Watergate, Richard Nixon ordered a huge arms airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur War, for which Golda Meir was eternally grateful. Then, with Dr. Kissinger, he brokered an armistice and effected a severance of Sadat's Egypt from the Soviet Bloc – to the West. Jimmy Carter took it from there, brokering the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel that still hold.
Does Rice believe that because Nixon, Kissinger and Carter did not insist that Sadat hold elections they were on some lesser moral plane than her own virtuous self?
President Bush's father, in the Gulf War, put together a coalition of NATO nations and Arab autocracies, including the Syria of Hafez al-Assad – a ruler no less ruthless than Saddam – to expel Iraq from Kuwait in a six-week war that was a military masterpiece. U.S. casualties were a tenth of those in our current war, an end to which is not remotely in sight.
Was that Bush I achievement diminished because Saudi Arabia, which provided bases and troops, and Kuwait, the nation we rescued, were, neither of them, democracies on the New England model?
From Truman to Bush I, from Acheson to Jim Baker, with rare exceptions, U.S. Middle East policy was crafted, as it should have been, to secure the vital interests of the United States. Who is Rice, and what exactly are her accomplishments, to demean what these men achieved: victory in a half-century Cold War with the Soviet Empire?
There is another problem with this schoolmarmish scolding of Arab nations that aided this country in the Cold War, but have failed to live up to Rice's standards.
Has she or President Bush thought through the consequences should their hectoring succeed in destabilizing and bringing down Saudi Arabia or Egypt? Have they observed how the elections they've been demanding have been going of late?
In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Amal militia took every parliamentary seat. In the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas is so strong the Palestinian Authority postponed the July elections. If Hosni Mubarak held free elections in Egypt, his principal rival would be the Muslim Brotherhood. If the Saudi monarchy should hold elections, Osama bin Laden might not win, but my guess is he makes the runoff.
President Bush is riding for a fall. He sold the war in Iraq to the country on the hard security ground that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, that he may have had a role in 9-11, that he was hell-bent on getting WMD and atom bombs, and that, when he did, he would give them to fanatics to use on Washington, D.C. The lady who stapled together that false and perhaps falsified case for George Bush was Condi Rice.
Now they tell us the war was about democracy in Iraq and the Middle East – i.e., a nobler cause than any such mundane concerns as American national security.
This is baby boomers working up noble-sounding excuses and preparing high-minded defenses in the event they wind up as failures.
When the Great Society programs of LBJ led to riots, inflation, campus upheaval, crime waves, polarization and a quarter century of almost unbroken Republican rule, liberals exonerated themselves by saying that, even though they had lost the country, they were still blameless, since their motives were so superior to those of their adversaries.
The liberals' defense of the Great Society debacles will be the neocons' defense if we lose the Middle East. But Rice's homilies about how high-minded she was will carry little weight. Americans won't buy it. Just ask Robert McNamara.
What is this guy whining about??
I heard Rice's speech and thought it was great. I don;t think it was meant to be taken in the way this guy took it.
Rice is smart and classy and our so-called Arab "Allies" are allies only in so far as their personal interests at the moment and most of these Wahhabists, etc, hate our guts.
"Now they tell us the war was about democracy in Iraq and the Middle East – i.e., a nobler cause than any such mundane concerns as American national security."
This guy is totally off the wall. Our national security is tied to stable democratic pro-western governments in the Middle East, like Israel and the Iraqi regime we are trying to set up now.
Egypt, Yemen, Sauid Arabia, Syria, Iran, are all powder kegs, in part due to our prior support for military strongmen thinking incorrectly they would be reliable allies and represent a stable secure governmnet - they have provided neither and have become a spawning ground for fanatics.
IMO the military in Turkey has stepped in a half a dozen times to keep it a Democracy that Atta Turk set up way back when. Pat defeats his own arguement, as witnessed by both Algeria and Egypt also freezing out the fanatics.
I think thats his point. Free elections may not produce the result we want.
"Dems, hello??? We could get out of Vietnam; we can’t GET OUT of terrorism."
Pat must be referring to the stability of the Khobar towers, or the attacks our embassy in Kenya, or the attacks on Israel for which Saddam publicly paid 25,000 dollars each, or the Saddam's shooting at our planes constantly, or the attacks by Saddam on Kuwait, or Saddam's war on the Iranians, or his war on the Kurds, or his mass murders and the graves we're still finding in Iraq. Pat stopped hating tyranny when the Soviet Union fell. Now he sees tyrants as cultural expressions of different peoples, no better and no worse than democracy and the rule of law; he became a moral relativist and an apologists for dictators no matter how bloody they are. He's a blow hard and an egotistical buffoon.
Secretary of State under a successful, twice-elected Republican president, Pat, you pinhead. And your own, by way of comparison...?
[::Insert Sound of Crickets Chirping Here::]
When's Patty going to learn that we won't accept the national socialism that would be absolutely necessary to enforce his desires against our nation?
And why does Joseph continue to publish Pat's obvious message? The answer to that is obvious, but the world saw enough of it before and during WWII.
In some ways, it is reflective of the same naivete Papa Bush displayed when he deployed the military for a humanitarian photo-op in Somalia.
We shouldn't be scolding 'em. We should be killing them. But they'll have to wait their turn - and they have that long to get their act together.
Buchanan can go do this and that to himself.
Damn right!
Now we've got our very own piece of the action! (/sarc)
Oh?
You think all this democracy crap was saved till last jus cuz it was so "special"?
She can say that again! :o(
Secretary of State under a successful, twice-elected Republican president
I'm impressed.
From Presidential sycophant to Secy of State in one leap!
I agree.
But we COULD have taken the Willie Sutton approach and gone to where the terrorists ARE, instead of creating a new, huge nest of them.
Bin Laden smiles and recruits.
The preemptive invasion of Iraq had NOTHING to do with going after the enemy!
The very term WOT is a repugnant, open-ended piece of newspeak which opened the door to perpetual wars of ours ruler's choosing.
I could be wrong, but didn't Ronald Reagan call the Soviet Union the "EVIL EMPIRE" and didn't it work? The difference may be the "friend" issue, but I think calling a spade a spade is good policy and Pat Buchanan is a washed-up has-been.
Nice observation.
Oddly enough it's pretty close to the foreign policy principle that we (and most every other countries) followed for eons.
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