(WASHINGTON) (July 27, 2006) It's time for Condoleezza Rice to resign or be fired. This condo should be condemned.
Rice is professionally incompetent. She has made a shambles of our Middle East policy.
Three years ago I was the first American in Baghdad to call for the removal of Paul Bremer. Bremer was a joke. But he left a lingering disaster in his wake. I was attacked by the White House but I stood my ground. History has vindicated my original insights and sentiments: Bremer was a loser, and America was the big loser. We are still paying the price of Bremer's incompetence.
Now it's time for truth telling about Rice: she must go. And fast. Like now. She has no credibility and no respect in the world community where she has to function. The fiasco in Rome yesterday, which I predicted, was all too obvious before her plane landed.
Simply put, Rice is unable to influence the psycho samurai in the White House that want war, not peace, in the Middle East. Now their grand scheme to use Israel as the spearhead of American policy has backfired.
Rice makes statements that are ludicrous and advocates positions that are ridiculous. Take, for example, the issue of a cease-fire in Lebanon. Cease-fires are arranged so that parties can negotiate. We have been negotiating with the North Koreans after a cease-fire in 1953. Yup, we're still negotiating.
Rice, on the other hand, has demanded that as preconditions of a cease-fire in Lebanon, Hezbollah surrender and disarm in advance. What would be left to "negotiate?" Why would the military force that is winning (Hezbollah) surrender and disarm in obedience to the forces that are losing (Israel and the United States)?
Rice has allowed Israelis to attack civilian targets because of false claims that Hezbollah men are hiding there. But given the pathetic and incompetent state of Israeli military intelligence, it is clear that Israel is committing mass murder in Lebanon without any military intelligence or political intelligence. By our own statistics, there aren’t enough Hezbollah fighters to fill all of the apartment buildings we have destroyed in Beirut. We are allowing Israelis to commit mass terror.
Simple terror as a policy or as an action seldom achieves its purpose. Terror failed on 9/11, when Americans reacted by uniting and overthrowing the Taliban. Terror did not encourage the British to surrender during the Blitz of London. And so on.
The disclosure that Israel is using CBU's against unarmed civilians is sure to stir more revulsion against the United States. Cluster bomb units (CBU's) contain shards that can cut to shreds anything within large areas, as large as a football field. They are not precision weapons. Since it is obvious that Hezbollah's fighters are inside bunkers and foxholes, the only people vulnerable to CBU's are unarmed civilians.
Israel dropped leaflets demanding that Lebanese flee the border areas, and then apologized for murdering the very people it has urged to flee by bombing them in flight. Where is the outrage? There is none. Instead, Condo mouths platitudes about our "concern for the Lebanese people." What rubbish. A Secretary of State that has become a laughingstock abroad cannot function. Under any theory Rice is useless, counterproductive and incompetent.
Rice has used the right-wing parrot at the U. N., John Bolton, to block a resolution condemning the Israeli murder of U. N. peace observers.
Consider two obvious options: first, posit that Rice actually believes the policy nonsense she is uttering. Then she is completely incompetent and unable to function in a negotiating posture. She doesn't have a clue how to negotiate. Instead of offering a forum for negotiations, the United States has demanded that the bloodshed continue. Now that Israeli blood is flowing, you may see Rice's adamancy reverse.
Second, consider that Rice knows what she is doing is hopeless, and that she is merely holding on because she is an incurable careerist, a pianist whose piano won’t play but who keeps pounding at the keys in frustration because she will not walk away from the recital. Then Rice is a doing a great disservice to dissent and common sense. If she resigned, walked out and condemned the inanity of the Bush foreign policy, maybe she might actually accomplish something.
By all of this criticism I not to mean to say the Democrats would be doing any better. They have been screaming because the Iraqi Prime minister gave a candid assessment of the Lebanese invasion, and called it immoral. The man was pilloried for his position. Both Republicans and Democrats apparently consider Iraq a vassal state when it comes to U. S. support for Israel. Unfortunately for Condo, no one has told the Iraqis. And we wonder why they hate us.
Condo's days are numbered. She will either pay the price for her own incompetence in formulating a policy that is worthless and destructive of America's interests and values, or she will pay the price of being a stooge for policymakers who are themselves useless jerks with a single-minded devotion to supporting Israeli policies at the expense of destroying America's role in the world. These fanatics will dump Rice to conceal their own involvement in the region's chaos.
Condo, it's time to go. To reprise Illinois' Senator Everett Dirksen at the 1952 republican Convention, "You led us down the road to defeat." Come to think of it, we led the Israelis down the same road. And they led us down the same road. Either you are responsible for the disaster in Lebanon in which case you should go, or you are not responsible, in which case you should go.