Not like Blackwater ever left, but, seriously, there are no repercussions for the firm. None. What does Erik Prince have on Condi or Bush?:
Last fall, Blackwater Worldwide was in deep peril.
Guards for the security company were involved in a shooting in September that left at least 17 Iraqis dead at a Baghdad intersection. Outrage over the killings prompted the Iraqi government to demand Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and led to a criminal investigation by the F.B.I., a series of internal investigations by the State Department and the Pentagon, and high-profile Congressional hearings.
But after an intense public and private lobbying campaign, Blackwater appears to be back to business as usual.
The State Department has just renewed its contract to provide security for American diplomats in Iraq for at least another year. Threats by the Iraqi government to strip Western contractors of their immunity from Iraqi law have gone nowhere. No charges have been brought in the United States against any Blackwater guard in the September shooting, either, and the F.B.I. agents in Baghdad charged with investigating whether Blackwater guards have committed any crimes under United States law are sometimes protected as they travel through Baghdad by Blackwater guards.
The chief reason for the company’s survival? State Department officials said Friday that they did not believe they had any alternative to Blackwater, which supplies about 800 guards to the department to provide security for diplomats in Baghdad. Officials say only three companies in the world meet their requirements for protective services in Iraq, and the other two do not have the capability to take on Blackwater’s role in Baghdad. After the shooting in September, the State Department did not even open talks with the other two companies, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, to see if they could take over from Blackwater, which is based in North Carolina.
Didn't even try? That kinda sums up the whole Iraq experience.
Well that would be interesting, since there are persistent rumors pertaining to why Rice has never been married. Will the GOP make history in more ways than one (or two, actually)?
Okay, I'll admit it. I often get my news from reading the crawl on the t.v. while I'm working out. But, I'm not the Secretary of State during major international crises, including a war I helped start. But, in fact, your Secretary of State also gets news about major world developments from the t.v. while she's working out. And, bad news does not interfere with her exercise regimen.
Just in case anyone still wonders why U.S. foreign policy is such a disaster, this passage in Maureen Dowd's column is illustrative:
In 2006, when Israel invaded Lebanon and many civilians died, including children, Condi and W. drew Arab and U.N. ire for not forcing Ehud Olmert to broker a cease-fire faster.
That same year, in another instance of spectacular willful ignorance, she was blindsided by the Hamas win in the Palestinian elections.
As she described it to Bumiller, she went upstairs at 5 a.m. the morning after the Palestinian elections in 2006 to the gym in her Watergate apartment to exercise on her elliptical machine. She saw the news crawl reporting the Hamas victory.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not right,’ ” she said. She kept exercising for awhile but finally got off the elliptical trainer and called the State Department. “I said, ‘What happened in the Palestinian elections?’ and they said, ‘Oh, Hamas won.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness! Hamas won?’ ”
When she couldn’t reach the State Department official on the ground in the Palestinian territories, she did what any loyal Bushie would do: She got back on the elliptical.
“I thought, might as well finish exercising,” Rice told Bumiller. “It’s going to be a really long day.” It was one of the few times she was prescient on the Middle East.
The Secretary of State -- and a bunch of other Bushies -- have been subpoenaed. Lying is so ingrained in the psyche of the Bush team, will they get that whole thing about telling the truth because they're under oath?:
A federal judge today ordered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and more than 10 other prominent current and former government officials to testify at the criminal trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of violating the Espionage Act.
The ruling from U.S. District Judge T. S. Ellis III in Alexandria directs that subpoenas be issued to officials including Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley, former high-level Department of Defense officials Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state.
They were directed to testify on behalf of Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, who are scheduled to go on trial Jan. 14 in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.
What are the chances any of that crowd actually testify? This case could get very interesting. Very.
The State Department will order as many as 50 U.S. diplomats to take posts in Iraq next year because of expected shortfalls in filling openings there, the first such large-scale forced assignment since the Vietnam War.
On Monday, 200 to 300 employees will be notified of their selection as "prime candidates" for 50 open positions in Iraq, said Harry K. Thomas, director general of the Foreign Service. Some are expected to respond by volunteering, he said. However, if an insufficient number volunteers by Nov. 12, a department panel will determine which ones will be ordered to report to the Baghdad embassy next summer.
"If people say they want to go to Iraq, we will take them," Thomas said in an interview. But "we have to move now, because we can't hold up the process." Those on the list were selected by factors including grade, specialty and language skill, as well as "people who have not had a recent hardship tour," he said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice previewed a possible shortfall in June, when she ordered that positions in Iraq be filled before any other openings at the State Department headquarters in Washington or abroad are available. At the time, Rice said it was her "fervent hope" that sufficient numbers would continue to volunteer. Her order followed a request by Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker in Baghdad for an increase in the number and quality of economic and political officers.
"Fervent hope." Ha. Send all those GOP Hill staffers who are such fervent supporters of the war to Iraq. They won't join the military, maybe they can go pretend to be diplomats, because everyone knows there's no diplomacy happening.
Condi and her boss have an amazing record of failure. Everything they touch -- everything -- is a disaster.
Seriously, these people never realize that they are criticizing Putin over and over for the very things they are doing themselves.
The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.
"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.
"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.
President amassing too much power? Check. Countervailing institutions weak? Check. Undermined judiciary? Check.
This morning, NBC's Andrea Mitchell reported on a tough diatribe from Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed across the table at the U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense. According to Mitchell, Condi Rice was "visibly taken aback by Putin's threatening tone..."
In a tense start to talks on a range of thorny issues, President Vladimir Putin on Friday warned U.S. officials to back off a plan to install missile defenses in eastern Europe or risk harming relations with Moscow.
Addressing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Russian president appeared to mock the U.S. missile defense plan, which is at the center of a tangle of arms control and diplomatic disputes between the former Cold War adversaries.
U.S. foreign policy is mockable. And, as the leader of our foreign policy, Condi is certainly mock-worthy.
Condi and Gates are in Russia to sort out the Iran situation. Like that's going to happen.
Talking to Syria is treason! Pelosi's visit undermined the U.S. effort to isolate those terrorist Arabs! The Democrats are . . . wait, what? The Secretary of State is meeting with the Syrian foreign minister? Secretary Rice asked Syria for help??
Well, then.
After all, I read WaPo, I watched CNN, so I know Pelosi was killing our foreign policy! The media told me so. So is Rice a traitor, or was Pelosi actually doing the right thing? Even, I dunno, helpful to U.S. interests?
In all seriousness, I applaud Democratic leaders for doing the right thing even in the face of massive stupidity from Republicans and the media. As the Times reports,
In April, the White House sharply criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat of California, for visiting Damascus and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad, even going so far as to call the trip "bad behavior," in the words of Vice President Dick Cheney.
But less than a month later Ms. Rice walked through the cavernous hallways of a conference center in this desert resort town today and into the Sun Room to sit down with Mr. Moallem. An excited buzz went through the throngs of diplomats milling around. After the meeting, Mr. Moallem was mobbed by reporters and camera crews, while Ms. Rice quickly escaped back to her hotel.
"This is a marked improvement in the administration's ostrich policy approach, and a tacit admission of how wrong it was last month in criticizing the Speaker of the House and congressional colleagues, including myself, for going to Damascus," Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, said in a statement.
Just a month or so after Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with senior Syrian government officials, and was labeled a traitor by Republicans for visiting "a terror state," US Secretary of State Condi Rice is now planning to meet with senior Syrian government officials. Imagine that.
So does Pelosi get credit for the breakthrough in relations, or is Condi a traitor too?
What Iraq needed were Arabists and Foreign Service officers who understood the country's tribal allegiances, or who at least knew a Sunni from a Shia. What CPA seemed to be getting were people anxious to set up a Baghdad stock exchange, try out a flat-tax system, and impose other elements of a lab-school democratic- capitalist social structure. One of my officers returned from a trip to Iraq a month or two after CPA had taken over and told me, "Boss, that place runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody's ever been to an Arab country, and no one makes a decision but Bremer."
On the Bush administration's decision to de-Baathify the Iraqi government by firing everyone who was a member of the Ba'ath party:
We soon began hearing stories about how Iraqis could not send their kids to school because all the teachers had been dismissed for being members of the Ba'ath Party. In the context of a country armed to the teeth, this was not a good thing. If the kids and teachers were not in school, they were on the streets. I went to see Condi Rice and complained that the indiscriminate nature of the de-Ba'athification order had swept away not just Saddam's thugs but also, for example, something like forty thousand schoolteachers, who had joined the Ba'ath Party simply to keep their jobs. This order wasn't protecting Iraqis; it was destroying what little institutional foundations were left in the country. The net effect was to persuade many ex-Ba'athists to join the insurgency. Condi said she was very frustrated by the situation, but nothing ever happened. Several months later, with a full-blown insurgency under way, an interagency group headed by Deputy National Security Advisor Bob Blackwill desperately looked for ways to reach out to dissident Sunni Arabs. We again raised the subject of rolling back the de-Ba'athification order. Doug Feith retorted that doing so would "undermine the entire moral justification for the war."....
On one of his trips to Iraq, [Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz told our senior man there, "You don't understand the policy of the U.S. government, and if you don't understand the policy, you are hardly in a position to collect the intelligence to help that policy succeed." It was an arrogant statement that masked a larger reality. In many cases we were not aware of what our own government was trying to do. The one thing we were certain of was that our warnings were falling on deaf ears.
It's Condi's fault:
Without using her name, Tenet alleges that then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice did not exert the kind of scrutiny of Rumsfeld's and Cheney's ideas as she did of the CIA and the State Department. Tenet says the lack of clear White House oversight of reconstruction efforts in Iraq meant US policy was "almost guaranteed" to fail...
Whenever you decide to take the country to war, you have to know not only that you can defeat the enemy militarily but that you have a very clear game plan that will allow you to keep the peace. There was never any doubt that we would defeat the Iraqi military. What we did not have was an integrated and open process in Washington that was organized to keep the peace, nor did we have unity of purpose and resources on the ground. Quite simply, the NSC did not do its job.
For all the razzle-dazzle of Rice's first year as Secretary of State, it is hard to think of any real and substantial achievements. Her "transformational diplomacy" in the Middle East has achieved virtually nothing. None of the region's leaders, it seems, takes her seriously. Bush's democracy project, which Rice embraced so enthusiastically, is virtually dead and buried.
And there are no good signs that any peace talks of any kind between Israel and the Palestinians are likely in the foreseeable future, despite Rice's frantic shuttle diplomacy in the region last month. Her decline mirrors the disintegration of the Bush Administration. Her biggest battle right now is to work out how she can defy a subpoena from a key congressional committee demanding she testify about how it was that the Administration, in the months before the invasion of Iraq, used a "fabricated claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger".
Perhaps that's the real reason why she has remained silent as Bush has tried in vain to sell Americans on an Iraq policy that a majority of them are convinced cannot succeed.
Yesterday, House Democrats issued a subpoena to Condi Rice. They want some truthful answers about Iraq.
Condi's already lied repeatedly about the war, so it's probably no surprise that she doesn't want to go under oath to talk about Iraq. Yes, she's going to defy the subpoena:
"This is an issue that has been answered and answered and answered ... but if there are further questions that Congressman Waxman has then I am more than happy to answer them again in a letter because I think that that is the way to continue this dialogue," she told reporters in Oslo, where she is attending a NATO foreign ministers meeting.
"But there is a constitutional principle. This all took place in my role as national security adviser and there is a separation of powers and advisers to the president are -- under that constitutional principle -- not generally required to go and testify in Congress," she added. "So I think we have to observe and uphold constitutional principle."
No one in the Bush administration cares about observing and upholding constitutional principles. What that really means is that Condi has to protect herself from committing perjury.
The White House spokesmen acknowledged today what Senator Barbara Boxer said months ago, and got savaged by the White House for saying - namely, that having kids fighting over in Iraq changes the way a parent thinks about the war.
But both Perino and Bartlett acknowledged that part of Dowd's change in views has to be attributed to having a son getting ready to risk his life in a very difficult war. Bartlett said, "That can only impact a parent's mind when they work threw these issues." Perino said, "I can only imagine how this affects a parent's thinking."
"Who pays the price [for Bush's incompetence in Iraq]? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young," Boxer said. "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."
And look at what the White House spokesman had to say about all of this just three months ago:
White House spokesman Tony Snow on Friday called Boxer's comments "outrageous."
"I don't know if she was intentionally that tacky, but I do think it's outrageous. Here you got a professional woman, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Barbara Boxer is sort of throwing little jabs because Condi doesn't have children, as if that means that she doesn't understand the concerns of parents. Great leap backward for feminism," Snow told FOX News Talk's Brian and The Judge.
Another freezing, bitter day in DC. January may have been the warmest on record, but we haven't had cold like this for years.
Condi made a "surprise" visit to Iraq today -- both NBC and CNN dutifully reported it that way. The real surprise will come when any member of the Bush Administration announces in advance that they are making a trip to Baghdad -- a country the Bush Administration decided to invade four years ago. My bet is that no member of the Bush team will ever be able to announce an upcoming Baghdad visit that isn't a super-secret, surprise, drop-in and get out, kind of trip. Will never happen before 2009.
Okay, it's early. It's the weekend. But, there's plenty to say. Have at it.
