Posted on 09/21/2006 5:53:23 AM PDT by SJackson
I bet she wasn't surprised...but I also bet that she is sincerely ticked off.
The reporter apparently inhabits an alternate universe. Here on earth France (and the so-called "anti-war" protesters) only increased the likelihood of war by encouraging Saddam to believe that he could continue in defiance without unacceptable consequence.
And now France is doing the same again: putting us in a position where war may be necessary by sweeping other options off the table and encouraging intransigence in our enemies.
Her suprise in this incidence is as disengenuous as was her surprise that Hamas was going to win the Palestinian elections - that were being pressed into her timetable (inspite of warnings from Israel and Abbas that Hamas would win unless Abbas had more time).
I am truly convinced that Condoleezza Rice is not running the State Department, at all. It is running her and the permanent bureacracy at foggy bottom and her Deputy Undersecretary for Political Affairs (Nicholas Burns) are calling the shots; not her; she is a public figurehead and no more. And who is Nichlas Burns - he's the former chief foreign policy advisor to the 2004 Presidential Campaign of John Kerry.
TAKE IT BACK. I responded after reading only the first sentence, and without noting the author, the inestimable Amir Taheri, who then proceeds immediately to the very point I tried to "correct" him on.
Why isn't she calling the shots, or at least firing a bunch of people?
The French have never believed in goals or solutions to any crisis. To them talking is its own goal; while the real crisis continues to fester and escalate underdeath all their talk.
They run their nation the same way, and thus their Republic is in a state of constantly being torn down and rebuilt; based on some more talk. The current system is the Fifth republic in France in 200 years. Crisis are submerged under endless talk until there is no faith in their system. Then their mobs rip it down and demand a new one.
Why does America and England keep participating in French suicide pacts on foreign affairs?
You've asked the 64 million dollar question that many conservatives and some conservative Bush supporters have been asking for months. Unfortunately, none of his major well-known conservative supporters have yet been willing to breach this question in public. I have been told, in Email answers from two conservative members of Congress that therew are GOP conservatives in Washington who have been asking themselves this question. Until they publicly ask Bush, we won't get an asnwer.
Absolutely. We've been making the mistake of enabling France's impotent arrogance and deadly perfidy for decades.
Much as I like him otherwise, I blame Winston Churchill for setting the wrong precedent. When he had de Gaulle under his protection in London it woulda been so easy to bludgeon the bastard with a paperweight and bury the body under some V-2 rubble!
IMHO all we've been doing is playing out the diplomatic string until it's obvious that won't work before we take military action. If so, Jacques is doing us a favor by expediting that process.
Interesting article.
The US should use its economic, diplomatic and other elements of national power to destabilize France's govenment. There is no downside and great potential for some significant progress.
Well, I agree with the second part.
I disagree with your placement of the French as in an active, coordinated league with all our enemies.
The French are always out for the French, always seeking a role larger than their actual power demands and thus since the end of WWII, and more so since the end of the cold war, the only role that France has found compatible with its own sense of itself is to be an obstruction to whatever the U.S. is trying to do.
If France was not playing the role of an obstructionist, then it would be no more than a weak junior partner in a US led alliance; a role that is commensurate with the true degree of power it deserves. That reality is incompatible with the inflated view it has of itself. Thus it has been since the second German conquest of France.
Such friends have always been more dangerous than enemies, because as they seek a role that is larger than they deserve it places them as an ineffectual, bumbling, obstructing interlocutor between us and our real enemies. In that role of pretending to stand between us and our enemies, they are really just out for themselves and never really representing either our interests or even our joint interests with them. That hurts our ability to obtain our actual joint interests, against our enemies, because our enemies naturally prefer the weaker demands made on them by the weaker party - France. This aspect of our relationship with France can be seen in almost every major diplomatic area throughout the "cold war" and since the demise of the Soviet Union.
France was always seeking a separate peace for the west on France's terms, the Soviets would not reject it but seek our acceptance of France's terms, because without our agreement the terms had no power. We would not agree and France would then proclaim that it had taken the higher ground, when in fact all it had done was convince the Soviets that they ought to hold out against us.
France = self-interest, puffed-up sense of itself, obstruction of an ally of much greater power, myth making of the rightness of its position, selling that myth as a means to purchase more global acceptance of its role as an obstructionist.
By the 1960s, our enemies across the world learned that if they wanted to defeat us diplomatically in international forumns, all they had to do was to play on France's inflated sense of itself and France would discard western multilateral positions for its own self-interest - just to oppose the US, because opposing the US suits its national ego.
This may surprise you, but Bush and Rice determined long ago that the Iranian regime wanted the atomic bomb, and war. The Hezbollah War of July was Iran's penultimate answer to her efforts. This round of diplomacy is mere window dressing, and I think she knows this. However, due to the collapse of CIA efforts in Iraq and our inability to find WMD there, we have to be absolutely sure that we play out the diplomatic line in Iran before we go in. The voting public will demand answers, proof, and accountabililty. The information from the Israelis must be on the order of absolute.
Understand the stakes here. We will be acting alone, in concert with the Israelis. By the time we have to strike, the Blair Government will have fallen. We shall get moral support from John Howard's Australia only, and perhaps from the Abe Government in Japan. Otherwise, the new Netanyahu Government of Israel will be the only ones at our side. Rice wanted a larger coalition. She will not have it. Persian diplomacy has been elegantly simple, but effective. He has aped Hitler and Ribbentrop. It is 1938 all over again.
People who say that Nicholas Burns is running Condi Rice don't know what they are talking about. No one runs Rice except the President. Not even Dick Cheney has been able to run Condi out of town. We are dealing with an aggressively theocratic fascist state that wants to provoke a war with us on its terms, and expects us to fight a war of pinprick strikes. Rice believed that it was possible to enlarge any possible coalitiong against Iran by forcing the Iranians to refuse generous terms. Naturally, we were betrayed by the French, and held up for naifs by the Russians and the Chinese. The only thing she gets out of this whole process is to add validity to the claim, "well, we tried".
I strongly suspect that the Iranians will get far more than they bargained for, and that Rice's diplomacy is an effort to forestall the inevitable, which she knows in her heart of hearts must, of needs be, come. It must come because of the wicked nature of the regime.
Henry Kissinger spoke the truth. He said that Iran had a choice. It could be a nation, or it could be a cause. If it chose to be a nation with normal national interests, the U.S. would have no problems with it. However, its leaders have chosen to be a cause. Matters are worse.
Well you disagreed with me, but then made my argument for me. While I do not believe that members of the French government sit down with our enemies, I think that it is in their very nature to knock us down, in order to prop themselves up.
France wishes for the days of old when they were a real power. The only way for them to do that is to obstruct America, as you said, and get the world to look at them as the true peacemakers, organizers, or saviors of the downtrodden or wartorn countries of the world.
They wake up each day and despise us for our comfort, wealth and freedom that we have in America. Every fiber of their being wishes they were in our position.
Yes, as I said, they live and act in envy. They do not sit and plot with our enemies. Their self-centered national desire alone provides the only help our enemies need from them.
You think my comments about Rice are soley related to Iran? Under Rice our State Department has been wrong in every major change in the Middle East since she came in and appointed Nicolas Burns.
Cheney and Rummy want, and have wanted stronger sanctions by us on Syria, for the continued flow of men, material and money for insurgents from Syria into Iraq. Rice and Burns have blocked stronger diplomacy, stronger military threats and stronger sanctions. The Syrian role in Iraq has grown.
A year ago, our military generals, Rummy and Cheney had the same message for Bush vis-a-vis strong steps with the leading Shia representatives in Iraq that Sadr must be disarmed and Iranian activities in Iraq must be strongly countered by the coalition and by Iraqi representatives who want to claim they will stand up for an independent Iraq. They failed. Foggy bottom's answer is to do nothing and just let the Iraqis pay the price if they alone cannot negotiate with Iran to get it to stop interfering. Iran now has its own fully operational defacto government in southern Iraq where its consulates, bring in the money and the IED's for its Shia militia groups and its bullies tell the Iraqi government officials what to do and assassinates them when they don't. The entire operation is reported in the west as pertaining to rival Shia groups but it is Iran.
Due to Rice and Burns our generals in Iraq are now in the same situation we put our generals in in Vietnam - a war conducted to support the State Department's image of its capabilities; capabilities in war it does not have. Our military conduct in Iraq is now totally dependent on the political decisions of the State Department and its failed and continuing to fail over-reach of what it can and cannot achieve, by "diplomacy".
Rice was told by Israel and by Abbas that if the PA elections proceeded on Burn's insistance of the timetable, Abbas would loose and Hamas would win. Her and Burn's mythical image of their vision of what would happen outweighed the best advice they had. Then, as now, she pretended to be surprised at the outcome. Why? Because her chief advisor, Burns, had assured her of a different outcome.
While one-half of the blame for some of the mistakes in the recent class with Hezbolla can be placed on Olmert, in Israel, the fact is that his biggest mistake was allowing Israel to be pulled around by the nose - should they or should they not take a particular action, and when they should or shouldn't take it - by Burns and Rice's flunkies at State. Her big and very public demand was that "a cease fire should not return everything to the status quo ante". And where is everything regarding Hezbolla now? Back at the "status quo ante". Still armed, still being rearmed by Syria and Iran; redigging new bunkers and new missle launch pads; no UN force is going to enforce the UN resolution to disarm them and not even the Lebanese army is going to disarm them. Status quo ante.
Ditto Korea - status quo ante. Ditto Darfur - status quo ante. Ditto Burma - status quo ante. Ditto all of South America - not even "status quo ante" but outright reversals. Ditto NATO and EU help in Afghanistan, not enough and no real US pressure to help.
Rice has got to be one of the worst Secretary of States in a period when the US is involved in so many crisis. Why? She doesn't have a clue. Burns and Foggy bottom are running her and as usual when Foggy Bottom runs things, either neither happens or what does happen is sold to be an even with substance when it is no more than a smokescreen.
As far as Iran and its nukes. You can forget it. Burns has won that one already. We are not going to do anything other than negotiate. We are not going to make sanctions. We are not going to "take out their nuke facilities". We are not going to threaten our commerical allies, like China, to get their vote with us. We are going to do nothing. Burns and his liberal friends in the RINOs and the Dims are setting us up to "live with a nuclear armed Iran" as if the situation was no different than a nuclear armed Russia. They don't know what they are talking about and unless Bush wakes up and fires Burns and Rice, and puts someone like Bolton as Secretary of State, then he is going to be no better than Clinton and just hand the problem of Iran to the next POTUS, more dangerous than when he started. Not only will she be nuclear Armed, she be in charge of a good portion of Iraq if the Iraqis - left by Burns and Rice on their own - cannot get their act together.
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