That's an interesting bit of information to add to Bush's promise that we will not pull out of Iraq on his watch.
Add it up and you get a failure to defeat terrorism and a failure in Iraq for the whole duration of the Bush presidency and the republican control of the congress.
We've seen the seriousness with which Condeleeza Rice has taken her job, shopping for $600 shoes during one crisis, take the time to play piano while cancelling, for lack of time, visiting Viet Name, where a US citizen has been held captive since summer of 2005.
The conversation begins with her describing herself as an academic and ends by saying how glad she'll be to return to Stanford "and do something else."
Maybe Condi should just go, since she doesn't seem to be taking her job very seriously. Of course, with Bush's month long Crawford vacations as her example, who can blame her for her blase attitude.
On the other hand, maybe the detached Bush-Rice approach is part of a systematic strategy to "stay the course," to stay in a state of war, to stay in Iraq, to keep the orange and red alerts going because that's what keeps the base in line. Drop the fear, drop the threat and where's the reason to support the party that is supposedly better fighting terrorism?
Maybe that's why the WSJ says,
Thus, implicit in much of what Ms. Rice says is the idea that the U.S. has the luxury of time.
Ask the families of the half million plus GIs who have rotated through Iraq and Afghanistan how they feel about the "luxury of time."
You have to wonder. Bush won't leave Iraq on his watch, won't defeat terrorism on his watch. What makes him so good at fighting terrorism? Maybe it's his ability to keep the fight going. Maybe it's his ability to look for and create conflict, his ability to engage with violence.
Of course there are other approaches. Diplomacy, economic pressure, building good will through investing in education and health care instead of shock and awe destruction and bombing.
Diplomacy, school building medical missions don't have the dramatic effeect of a good explosion, of the report of the capture of the second in command Al Qaeda leader, even if that event keeps happening, like a deja vu event.
The Democrats want to get out the message that Bush and the Republicans not only misled us into the war, and are doing a terrible job, fraught with misjudgments and bad planning, but also that they are misleading us, distorting the facts and lying about the realities of the Iraq and Afghan occupations and the "war" on terrorism.
For example, the WSJ, cites Rice's attitude towards the role of moderates in Iran,
Do these people even exist? "I do not believe we're going to find Iranian moderates," she says. "The question is, are we going to find Iranian reasonables.
Most tellingly, the WSJ, usually a friend of the republicans, comments on her remark,
That's an interesting way of framing the matter, although perhaps not quite in the way Ms. Rice intends. There are, in fact, iranian moderates; They are the 80% of the people who oppose the regime. The house has just approved the Iran Freedom Act, which says the U.S. should "support peaceful pro-democracy forces in Iran," and mirrors the 1998 iraq Liberation Act that became a precursor to regime change there.
There it is. Rice ignores the 80% of the Iranian people who oppose their leaders. That's the kind of groupthink that led the US into war with Iraq-- failure to see reality.
Then again, Condi's observation "I don't think that this is a battle, if you will, or a struggle that's going to be won on George W. Bush's watch." was buried in the WSJ's article. This is an example of how the mainstream media are failing to even see the problems, or, worse, are intentionally ignoring them.
Whatever the reason for this "gift" fromt he WSJ, informing us that Bush's closest confidant basically reports that Bush will be a failure at fighting terrorism during his presidency, it is something we can be thankful for learning.
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