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.
Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice and leap for joy on that day! Behold, your reward will be great in heaven. For their ancestors treated the prophets in the same way.
Luke 6:22~23
Our whacked out view for a couple hundred years was that, beyond diplomatic pressure, SUCH was none of our damned business!
How long do you think it will take us to get around to Zimbabwe?
Well, its what we SHOULD be doing.
And supporting these Arab dictators has been counterproductive. They spawn radical groups with their brutal and savage techniques.
History has proven that democracies are less likely to engage in aggressive foreign military policies than dictatorships and Rice well ennunciated that position in her speech.
She's our best crack at defeating Hillery. Especially if teamed with Allen or Tancredo.
Unadulterated Koolaid.
Post WW I Germany was a democracy.
By contrast, our new best friend (and Bin Laden control center) is the undisturbed Islamic Republic of Pakistan.
"Unadulterated Koolaid.
Post WW I Germany was a democracy."
You are the Koolaid dispenser here iconoclast.
"Democratic" Germany didn't start WW2. Hitler had buried the Weimar Republic before he began his push for Lebensraum.
If anything, most Democracies are TOO peaceful. They are almost pacifistic. Read some history.
No, we are now reaping what abandoning our policies have sown. Petty dictators, kept on a sufficiently short leash, are infinitely preferable to elected governments like the mullocracy in Iran. Or France, for that matter.
Been there, face to face.
Democracy? We can civilize them or kill them. We're trying the civilization thing first, we always have the other option open.
p.s. Since iraq was just a peaceful country minding it's own business ,I guess we should have invaded canada or mexico. They have oil too and they're a lot closer.
You take 'em one at at time ... I will do my best to reply as time and duties permit.
And you think once/if we manage to install a puppet regime it's gonna stay that way?
That's where the Koolaid comes in ZULU.
Are you some kind of Rip Van Winkle?
Not even the Fox News talking heads make these ludicrous claims anymore as to the cause of this debacle.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
Had it been just about crude oil, you'd be absolutely correct.
But mull this acronym over for a while .... O.I.L.
1) O is for oil.
2) I is for Israel (the defense thereof)
3) L is for logistics ... i.e. our new cites for defense bases in the ME to replace those in Saudi Arabia that we crawled away from with our tails between our legs!
Bush was sold a bill of goods (not difficult considering) that all this could be accomplished with a little cakewalk war and off he went!
I think I shall never forget/forgive his declaring victory in his little airman's suit!
OMG, "hope" and "helping" all in one sentence? Losing your touch?
Or just "talking down"?
Only on the surface. It was a powder keg for years. And the Shah was a butcher in his own right. His secret police [Savak]were.
I don't know that we had many options in the middle east at the time because our policy was guided by cold war realities and the encroachment of the USSR in the region.
But don't kid yourself regarding Iranian stability under the Shah. It was an illusion for many years before 1979.
Your replies are becoming more and more confusing.
The Shah's problems started in the mid 70's, when he declared himself "emperor" and usurped the authority of the mullahs (or at least made them think he was going to) in religious matters. That's when SAVAK became really oppressive. Throughout the 50's and 60's, there was relative stability.
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