If you had any lingering doubts in your mind that the Bush Doctrine, and therefore U.S. national security, is dead, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has delivered
the unmistakable coup de grace:
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has sought the advice of former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton ahead of a planned Middle East peace parley scheduled to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, in November or December.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Saturday that Rice met with Carter this week. The two reportedly discussed the peace talks Carter brokered between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s. The White House called the meeting with Carter positive and "to the point."
Rice has also spoken with Clinton, who led the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians in the 1990s. "[Secretary of State] Rice is trying to learn from others what can be done and how their experience can be adapted to today's situation," McCormack said, adding that Rice placed great emphasis on "learning from the past."
The State Department also reported that Rice has recently conferred with former UN Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, as well as her predecessors James Baker, Henry Kissinger, and Madeline Albright. [emphases added]
This is a little like getting back your oncology test results and seeing that they turned out positive. Or finally screwing up the courage to ask out the pretty girl you've been worshipping from afar only to have her laugh in your face and go tell all her friends that "Pruneface" actually thought she'd want to be seen with a "dork" like you. Moments of tragedy and/or humiliation that you suspected were the case all along, for which you thought you were prepared when they finally happened, but which still floored you when they did.
I'm
still coughing and gagging at this revelation, myself.
George W. Bush sent his SecState to grovel at the feet of
Mr. Peanut? The goober plenopotentiary who's made it his business to aid and abet every enemy of the United States for the past twenty-seven years, the seditious buttinsky who has made contemptuous hash of the Logan Act by butting into U.S. foreign policy-making at every opportunity, the hapless boob who surrendered strategic nuclear superiority to the old Soviet Union and nearly lost the Cold War in the process, and the bitter, old piece of gutter-sniping Demotrash who has had the unmitigated temerity to sit in high moral dudgeon over the current president's former efforts to safeguard the nation and its people from far more horrific sequels to 9/11?
His, and that of his Arabist, dhimmized fellow-travelers, is the "experience" from which Dubya sent Condi to "learn"?
Here's a news flash, Mr. President: you
ALREADY "learned from the past" by abandoning the weak-assed, terrorist-appeasing foolishness of these failures and quislings when you formulated the Bush Doctrine in the first place. That you now debase yourself by sending your foreign minister to, in effect, supplicate for their forgiveness....Well, I'm sure it made
THEIR respective days, and then some. Can appointments with bin Laden and Ahmadinejad be next?
Oh, yes, certainly, I know this is in the context of yet another attempt to bulldoze Israel into another Holocaust, but do you really think it stops there?
To quote the noted philosopher
"Diamond" Dallas Page, "
I don't THINK so":
Yesterday, the Bush Administration announced a broad package of sanctions against Iran in an attempt to boost its campaign to stop Tehran's nuclear program by non-military means.
Do I need to quote any further? Okay, how about this:
The [Washington] Post's reaction is to commend the imposition of new sanctions as "the best way to avoid military action."
Y'know, I bet the WaPo said the same thing when FDR placed that oil embargo on Imperial Japan in 1941.
As Brother Deacon notes, negotiations by the Europeans, U.N. Security Council resolutions, and weak multilateral sanctions have all been ineffective. But what that ineffectiveness has cost us more than anything else is
time. This confrontation with the mullahgarchy over its pursuit of nuclear weapons has
always been a race against time, and each feckless flinch from taking the only steps capable of preventing the mullahs from attaining their unshakable goal has improved their position and damaged our own.
Could Iranians have once liberated themselves by their own efforts if we had lent them moral and material assistance, as voices like
Michael Ledeen and
Ed Morrissey, and
Iranian dissidents like Akbar Ganji, relentlessly urge? I'm personally dubious of the efficacy of home-grown revolutions to overthrow vicious totalitarian dictatorships; history shows that upheavals of that magnitude typically require a lot more assistance than clandestine checks and cheerleading from the sidelines. But with time, that's certainly an option that could, and should, have been pursued. It'd have probably been to no avail, but at least we'd have exhausted that avenue of attack, leaving military action to be undertaken with no residual doubts.
Of course, we never did even that much, preferring instead to wallow in self-inflicted fictions and delusions of "moderates" in the mullahgarchy with which we could "do business," "negotiate" endlessly, dick around with this "sanctions regime" or that one, anything to avoid facing the reality of this crisis head on: the mullahs want nukes, nothing is going to persuade or intimidate them from getting them, and when they have them, they will use them - including against us. That is the basic, distilled, bluster-filtered message that their frontman, Adolph Ahmadinejad, has been delivering for the past two years. We just don't want to listen.
And that's why the chastened, neutered, and now, with Condi Rice's penultimate "pilgrimmage," castrated Bush Administration persists in letting the storm clouds of disaster gather, the world's most dangerous regime develop and obtain the world's most dangerous weapons, and thus hastening Armageddon, by ducking the only possible means of averting this hideous fate in favor of more of the same failures of the past.
The "cowboy unilateralist warmonger" has been broken, my friends.
The punchline is that
the Bushophobes are incapable of realizing it.
