Pin the Tail on the Condi

Via First Draft, I see that the neocons are so desperate to assign someone else the blame for the mess they've made of the world that they're offering up one of their own:

Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda.

The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council, have urged the president to transfer Miss Rice out of the State Department and to an advisory role. They said Miss Rice, stemming from her lack of understanding of the Middle East, has misled the president on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

"The president has yet to understand that people make policy and not the other way around," a senior national security policy analyst said. "Unlike [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell, Condi is loyal to the president. She is just incompetent on most foreign policy issues."

The criticism of Miss Rice has been intense and comes from a range of Republican loyalists, including current and former aides in the Defense Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. They have warned that Iran has been exploiting Miss Rice's inexperience and incompetence to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They expect a collapse of her policy over the next few months.

You mean they hope and pray for a collapse of "her policy." They're somehow trying to pin the foreign policy disaster of this Administration, which they wrote themselves almost a decade ago, on the new girl. The point is that these guys need a scapegoat, and badly. Add to that the fact that the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Perle cabal don't believe in any of the core missions of the diplomatic arm of international relations.
I mean, if it were up to them, there wouldn't be a Department of State. So whoever's manning that portfolio is a prime candidate to get the ax.

It's uncomfortable for me to be put in any position defending Condi Rice; Lord knows she doesn't deserve it. But the war patrol agitating for unilateralism and no discussion on the international stage are ignoring how we got here. We invaded a country under false pretenses and did nothing but start a civil war (which some of these jokers see as a good thing, since at least the Sunnis and Shiites aren't fighting us anymore. Classy.) 100 Iraqis are dying every day from sectarian violence, and the GOP is so spooked even they don't want to talk about how there's "good news" anymore. The President himself admitted that the violence is "still terrible" 3-plus years after the invasion. Our military is so baffled as to what to do about this that they're being ordered to kill all military-aged males during raids. That's the strategy now; Kill 'em all and let Allah sort 'em out. Officials in the Iraqi government see a partition as all but inevitable and say things like "Iraq as a political project is finished." The White House won't even do a National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq because they're so deathly afraid of what they'll find (although the Democrats aren't letting them off the hook on that one).

All of these nightmares came out of a fundamental belief in projecting American power by attacking with force in the region, whether the subject of the attack was an imminent threat or not. The idea was to knock down and defeat an enemy to show the rest of the world the consequences for getting on the bad side of the United States. It's really as simple as that. This sustains the war machine, the military-industrial complex, and it allows the US to grow their power in an imperial sense but without the trappings of imperialism in the past. In other words, the world's financial and economic structures like the World Bank (headed by Wolfowitz) can come in and open markets and make these countries safe for multinational investment and exploitation. Oh, there will be permanent bases too; the better to prepare for strikes at other countries we feel the need to bully. But really, this is about economic colonization.

How did Condoleezza Rice have anything to do with that? This is the neocon project writ large. The notion that American foreign policy has somehow changed since she went to State is not true. We paid lip service to diplomacy before; we're doing it again. We didn't speak to Syria before; we're still not speaking (actually we were more cooperative in the past, when we rendered detainees there). We have the same awful position on North Korea. We have the same hardline position on Iran, despite their having offered a deal in 2003 that looks substantially like the deal offered now. We had unqualified support for Israel then; same now.

The only thing that's changed is that these neocon experiments aren't working. North Korea was plenty belligerent in the years leading up to their missile launch and we did nothing, offering them incentives since we knew they had the goods. Now, suddenly Newt Gingrich thinks we're screwing up and it's the Secretary of State who's to blame:

"We are sending signals today that no matter how much you provoke us, no matter how viciously you describe things in public, no matter how many things you're doing with missiles and nuclear weapons, the most you'll get out of us is talk," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said.

"Condi was sent to rein in the State Department," a senior Republican congressional staffer said. "Instead, she was reined in."

Mr. Gingrich agrees and said Miss Rice's inexperience and lack of resolve were demonstrated in the aftermath of the North Korean launch of seven short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles in July. He suggested that Miss Rice was a key factor in the lack of a firm U.S. response.

"North Korea firing missiles," Mr. Gingrich said. "You say there will be consequences. There are none. We are in the early stages of World War III. Our bureaucracies are not responding fast enough. We don't have the right attitude."

Really, Kim Jong-Il NEVER criticized the US until Condi Rice got to Foggy Bottom? Nonsense. The US strategy since the beginning of the Bush Administration has always been six-party talks. This is not a new development. It's not a hijacked policy. It's an old, bad development that recognized our trepidation with ACTUAL threats while we took care of PERCEIVED ones.

The neocon failures of the last 50 years should not be allowed to be shuffled off onto one person, no matter how incompetent he or she is. This is the standard policy of jettisoning the individuals to save the movement. "True conservatism isn't dead, it's just never been tried." That's simply untrue, and this "Blame Condi" gambit ought to be challenged.