Hamster Wheel Diplomacy: Rice goes nowhere in Middle East
You'll know Baghdad is safe for human habitation when a Bush administration official can announce a visit to Iraq's capitol in advance. That won't happen before the clock runs out on the administration in January of 2009: the city isn't safe for anyone, even inside the alternate reality known as the Green Zone, and it's getting worse, not better. To punctuate the reality, Condoleezza Rice's landing on her recent unannounced visit was delayed to wait out a wave of rocket fire directed at the Baghdad airport.
The continually escalating violence in Baghdad and elsewhere in the country was the subject of Rice's visit to the large compound that demarcates the effective boundaries of Iraqi government control. The US secretary of state informed Iraqis that the violence to which they're daily subjected is unacceptable and they have to do something about it. Then she departed for Kurdistan, where she told Kurdish leaders that they have to share what they've come to see as their oil with the rest of the country, and that they too must stop the violence. During her visit, a Kurdish member of parliament was kidnapped and killed, and several US soldiers died in combat as well.
After meeting with the Kurds she told reporters that "[w]e had a very good discussion about the national reconciliation process and the vision of [a] unified democratic Iraq that is stable, that is at peace and at peace with its neighbors." Mission accomplished.
Then she left, jetting off to London where, in a prelude to meetings in which one or more countries refuse to impose sanctions on Iran in response to that country's uranium enrichment program, she persuaded Europeans and China to once again discuss the prospect of sanctions.
Her Iraq visit was preceded by a visit to Israel that was also less than productive and inspired this plaintive opinion piece in the Times of London.
IT is no surprise that Condoleezza Rice didn’t manage to fix the crisis in the Palestinian Government. Most of her effort in this week’s tour of the Middle East was devoted to propping up Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, but the obstacles he faces are not budging.
More worrying was the cool response she received from the US’s Arab allies. She went in search of “moderate Arabs” and found instead an irritable chorus, chiding her for not doing more to break the Palestinian-Israeli deadlock. They sent her back to her starting point telling her that, in their part of the world, all roads lead to the West Bank.
Moderate Arabs cannot, apparently, also be irritated ones. The accumulated good will from the Bush administration's five years of variously neglecting and bungling the issue should have propelled Rice to a breakthrough, with a chorus of moderate Arabs chanting approval.
Meanwhile, North Korea is threatening to test a nuclear weapon. There's a triumph of diplomacy. Under the administration's guidance, North Korea has gone from threatening to kick out UN inspectors to actually doing so to creating weapons-grade plutonium to building a bomb to testing a nuclear warhead-capable missile to, now, readying for an actual weapons test.
Could anyone do worse? If you buy the notion of Rice as a moderating influence on the administration, sure. Bush could have chosen William "Thumbprint of Evil" Boykin to replace Colin Powell, or Pat Robertson. Rice may have ignored warnings about terrorist attacks when she was national security advisor, and she may have lost ground on all the major traumas facing the US since she became secretary of state, she may have helped enable Israel's array of war crimes in Lebanon and helped guarantee the ascendancy of Hizbullah there, but she hasn't held the wheel as the administration drives us off the cliff.
No wonder, then, that more people are backing her for a non-existent 2008 presidential bid than any other administration official.
Sadly for Condi, the all-important Cult of the Divine Dolphins has ruled her ineligible by default. Peggy Noonan says that no one whose steely resolve was not forged in the hot flame of battle should run the country in time of war, and since the war we're in is never-ending, that pretty much puts paid to President Rice.
I have come to give greater credence to the importance, in the age of terror, among our leaders, of having served in the military. For you need personal experience that you absorbed deep down in your bones, or a kind of imaginative wisdom that tells you even though you were never there what war is like, what invasion is, what building a foreign nation entails.
Of course several of our leaders did serve in the military, including nation-builder extraordinaire Don Rumsfeld and that guy, whatsisname, the former chairman of the joint chiefs who went to the UN and sold most of the country on invading Iraq. Powell, or something like that. Right wingers locked and loaded and went to war on behalf of the argument that George "Top Gun" Bush served honorably.
Noonan has, not surprisingly, lost the plot; this "chickenhawk" business was always crap. The problem isn't that our civilian leaders haven't served in the military: it's that they're out of their freaking minds, no matter if they're lifers like Powell or dilettantes like Bush. You don't have to serve in the military or even possess "a kind of imaginative wisdom" to know that going to war is a hideous business or that nation building is hard.
No: You just have to be sane, and when you drill for sanity in the Bush administration, from the White House down to Foggy Bottom, you hit a dry hole every time. Spinning the wheels may be good for a hamster's mental health, but it's not a cure for what ails the secretary of state.