Is there any doubt about the terrible job Condi Rice is doing at the State Department? When President Bush announced that she was his nominee to the position, this is what he had to say:
The Secretary of State is America’s face to the world. And in Dr. Rice, the world will see the strength, the grace and the decency of our country.
Yesterday, Condi Rice upheld those values of strength, grace, and decency by continuing the American policy of refusing to seek the cooperation of Iran or Syria in stabilizing Iraq because they might ask us for something that we don’t want to give. More below the fold.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday rejected a bipartisan panel’s recommendation that the United States seek the help of Syria and Iran in Iraq, saying the “compensation” required by any deal might be too high.
It is absolutely preposterous that we have a Secretary of State who refuses to even begin negotiations with a country because he or she fears the potential outcome. Let’s marvel in this statement:
She said she did not want to trade away Lebanese sovereignty to Syria or allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon as a price for peace in Iraq.
Only Condi or her Boss could fit that many stupid sentiments in one sentence without causing the Press Corps to explode. Let’s analyze them, quickly.
- Apparently she thinks that Iran and Syria would be stupid enough to request permission from the United States to invade Lebanon or build a nuclear weapon in exchange for cooperation.
- She must have missed the memo that said Iran has never actually expressed the desire to build a Nuclear bomb in the first place. Regardless of what their true intentions are, they’re certainly not going to ask for a bomb before they ask for a better civilian nuclear policy.
- Condi Rice has such low expectations of her own ability to negotiate, she is afraid that if she entered into talks with Tehran, they might end up convincing her that they should be allowed to nuke Israel.
Can it get dumber? I’m afraid so. From the same piece:
Indeed, Rice argued that the Middle East is being rearranged in ways that provide the United States with new opportunities, what she repeatedly called a “new strategic context.”
If Condi calls what’s happening in the middle east a “rearrangement”, I can only imagine what her house looks like after she decides the couch should be on the other side of the living room. Snark aside, this leads to an even more dangerous point about Rice’s style of non-diplomacy: Holding your breath until someone new comes along to negotiate is not any way to run foreign policy. Particularly if the nations you’re hoping for a democratic government to talk to happen to be Iran and Syria. Imagine if the United States had tried that in the Cold War.
Condi Rice has obviously been over her head at State since the day she set foot in Foggy Bottom. It’s time to begin asking for her resignation.
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