I have lost all respect for Condoleeza Rice.
Primarily I have lost it because she keeps trying to draw the line from 9/11 to Iraq and there is no line to draw. I found her “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” comment to be pure posturing. Blix and the UN wanted more time to find the “smoking gun” that was Saddam’s WMDs. He couldn’t find the gun, because it didn’t exist. We all know how that turned out.
This week, Rice again tried to draw the line by insisting that the situation in Iraq has nothing to do with instability in the middle east.
Only Iraq was chosen as a target because of its central location in the middle east. The idea being that democracy would start there and spread out in all directions. Nifty pipe(line) dream there. Crooks and Liars has a bit of a recent interview with the key bits here:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Extremists now appear to have been emboldened. The moderates appear to be in retreat. There is no peace process. There is war. How do you answer administration critics who say that the administration’s actions have unleashed, have helped unleash the very hostilities you hoped to contain?
RICE: Well, first of all, those hostilities were not very well contained as we found out on September 11th, so the notion that policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque.
Again with the propaganda. Pre Iraq, bin Laden and al qaeda were about as influential as Charles Manson and his family. The key difference is that Osama had disposable income to fund a bigger Helter Skelter. We didn’t fall for Manson’s plot, but Rice fell for Osama’s hook line and sinker. Through the ham handed handling of our foreign policy and repeated failure to exhuast diplomatic channels before going to the last resort of military force, we have elevated the Manson of the middle east to near-martyr status and multiplied is recruiting efforts a thousand fold. We squandered all of the good will and sympathy for 9/11 by holding accountable an entire country (and the wrong one at that).
Zero cred