Pat Buchanan on Condi Rice, neo-cons, & liberals.

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A Scolding from Miss Rice
by Patrick J. Buchanan
June 27, 2005
From the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to the Financial
Times,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is being hailed for her latest
public
scolding of America's Arab allies.
In what columnist David Ignatius calls the "signature line" of her
speech at
the American University in Cairo, Rice declared:
For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the
expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we
achieved
neither. Now, we are taking a different course.
What is it about Rice's speech that makes it so off-putting and
irritating?
First, in treating friends, common decency and diplomacy - and the Good
Book, as well - teach us that private admonition is preferable to the
public
declamation, which is often the mark of the hypocrite.
Second, Rice's public scolding fairly reeks of moral arrogance. Unlike
my
purblind predecessors, Rice is telling us, my president and I are moved
by a
higher, nobler cause. While we fight for democracy for Arabs and
Muslims, my
predecessors, going back to World War II, were only interested in
"stability." Thus, they all failed.
The claim is absurd. For Rice's predecessors had to conduct foreign
policy
during a Cold War in which freedom was at stake and under siege from
the
greatest enemy the West had known since the Islamic armies invaded
France in
the eighth century.
Thirty years ago, during Watergate, Richard Nixon ordered a huge arms
airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur War, for which Golda Meir was
eternally grateful. Then, with Dr. Kissinger, he brokered an armistice
and
effected a severance of Sadat's Egypt from the Soviet Bloc - to the
West.
Jimmy Carter took it from there, brokering the Camp David peace accords
between Egypt and Israel that still hold.
Does Rice believe that because Nixon, Kissinger and Carter did not
insist
that Sadat hold elections they were on some lesser moral plane than her
own
virtuous self?
President Bush's father, in the Gulf War, put together a coalition of
NATO
nations and Arab autocracies, including the Syria of Hafez al-Assad - a
ruler no less ruthless than Saddam - to expel Iraq from Kuwait in a
six-week
war that was a military masterpiece. U.S. casualties were a tenth of
those
in our current war, an end to which is not remotely in sight.
Was that Bush I achievement diminished because Saudi Arabia, which
provided
bases and troops, and Kuwait, the nation we rescued, were, neither of
them,
democracies on the New England model?
From Truman to Bush I, from Acheson to Jim Baker, with rare exceptions,
U.S.
Middle East policy was crafted, as it should have been, to secure the
vital
interests of the United States. Who is Rice, and what exactly are her
accomplishments, to demean what these men achieved: victory in a
half-century Cold War with the Soviet Empire?
There is another problem with this schoolmarmish scolding of Arab
nations
that aided this country in the Cold War, but have failed to live up to
Rice's standards.
Has she or President Bush thought through the consequences should their
hectoring succeed in destabilizing and bringing down Saudi Arabia or
Egypt?
Have they observed how the elections they've been demanding have been
going
of late?
In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Amal militia took every
parliamentary
seat. In the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas is so strong the Palestinian
Authority postponed the July elections. If Hosni Mubarak held free
elections
in Egypt, his principal rival would be the Muslim Brotherhood. If the
Saudi
monarchy should hold elections, Osama bin Laden might not win, but my
guess
is he makes the runoff.
President Bush is riding for a fall. He sold the war in Iraq to the
country
on the hard security ground that Saddam had ties to al-Qaida, that he
may
have had a role in 9-11, that he was hell-bent on getting WMD and atom
bombs, and that, when he did, he would give them to fanatics to use on
Washington, D.C. The lady who stapled together that false and perhaps
falsified case for George Bush was Condi Rice.
Now they tell us the war was about democracy in Iraq and the Middle
East -
i.e., a nobler cause than any such mundane concerns as American
national
security.
This is baby boomers working up noble-sounding excuses and preparing
high-minded defenses in the event they wind up as failures.
When the Great Society programs of LBJ led to riots, inflation, campus
upheaval, crime waves, polarization and a quarter century of almost
unbroken
Republican rule, liberals exonerated themselves by saying that, even
though
they had lost the country, they were still blameless, since their
motives
were so superior to those of their adversaries.
The liberals' defense of the Great Society debacles will be the
neocons'
defense if we lose the Middle East. But Rice's homilies about how
high-minded she was will carry little weight. Americans won't buy it.
Just
ask Robert McNamara.
http://www.theamericancause.org/

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[rmsmith 1]

Quote

Thirty years ago, during Watergate, Richard Nixon ordered a huge arms airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur War, for which Golda Meir was eternally grateful.

And the Arab response was the Oil Embargo, which delt the U.S. a huge economic decline for most of the seventies. For our manufacturing workforce, it marked the beginning of the end.