We all make mistakes. We know we make mistakes. I don't know any military commander, who is honest, who would say he has not made a mistake. There's a wonderful phrase: "the fog of war." What "the fog of war" means is: war is so complex it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily. Wilson said: "We won the war to end all wars." I'm not so naieve or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war. We're not going to change human nature anytime soon. It isn't that we aren't rational. We are rational. But reason has limits.
The question isn't if what she's done are mistakes, but if she knows we are at war? I believe she does. Revolutions emerge when great leaders abandon advice that maintains the present; pursue a clearly defined future while achieving intermediate goals aligned to that future - never abandoning strategy - constantly changing tactics.
American system, although born from revolution is not designed to make a new revolution. You need a very determined small leadership to conduct a large change.
Two years from now and there will be another administration and American people will get distracted by another issues.
UNLESS, UNLESS the secret is that this policy is bipartisan one, based on continuity of establishment lasting over generations. The empires are not being "acquired inadvertently, in a fit of absent-mindedness"
"The question isn't if what she's done are mistakes, but if she knows we are at war? I believe she does. Revolutions emerge when great leaders abandon advice that maintains the present; pursue a clearly defined future while achieving intermediate goals aligned to that future - never abandoning strategy - constantly changing tactics."
I believe that none of your well-spoken ideas have any true, real applicability to Condoleeza Rice. They may be part of what you would like to see, but I see nothing in anything she has done as Secretary of State to believe that she respresents or embodies your ideas in any way.
As soon as she became Secretary of State, she immediately hired Nicholas Burns to be her Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He has driven the State Department agenda under Rice, not her. And, before that job he was the senior foreign policy advisor to John Kerry's Presidential campaign in 2004, and before that he had years rotating between the permanent government policy wonks (40 years of failure) at State and liberal think tanks.
Condi is a bumbler running a schizophrenic foreign policy walking on a tightrope between the vision of George Bush and the 50 years of failed State Department ideology being pushed by Nicholas Burns. People in the Middle East have rightly begun to see American foreign policy for what Condi's schizophrenic balancing act represents - bumbling indecision.