Sustainable

by digby

The Bush administration are monsters. That is not hyperbole. There can be no other explanation as to why the secretary of state, the person in charge of American diplomacy, would be so crude and stupid.

From Maureen Dowd:

Condi doesn’t want to talk to Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran — “Syria knows what it needs to do,’’ she says with asperity — and she doesn’t want a cease-fire. She wants “a sustainable cease-fire,’’ which means she wants to give the Israelis more time to decimate Hezbollah bunkers with the precision-guided bombs that the Bush administration is racing to deliver.

“I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do,” she said.

Keep more civilians from being killed? Or at least keep America from being even more despised in the Middle East and around the globe?

Jesus. They don’t even know how to fake it anymore. Isn’t it at least smart to pretend you care about the dying children?

I guess not. These lunatics are still laboring under the false belief that the world is impressed by their macho trash talk and will capitulate just because George W. Bush says boo.

And notice that Rice says “Syria knows what it needs to do” which is apparently a reference to the leader of the free world spitting out that the Syrians need to “stop this shit” between flecks of dinner roll at the G8 conference. Any thought that he wasn’t speaking official US policy has, I think, been put to rest. Dear God. (Juan Cole noted at the time, “I come away from it shaken and trembling.” No kidding.)

Dowd continues:

Condi was as cool as ever in the State Department briefing room yesterday, perfectly groomed in a camel-colored suit with an athletic white stripe. Like her boss, she does not show any sign of tension over the fact that all of their schemes to democratize the Middle East ended up creating more fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism and anti-Americanism. Having ginned up the idea that Al Qaeda was state-sponsored terrorism backed by Saddam, now W. and Condi have to contend with the specter of real state-sponsored terrorism.

Like a professor who has grown so frustrated with one misbehaving student that she turns her focus on another, Condi put aside the sulfurous distraction of Iraq and enthused over the need to make the fragile democracy in Lebanon a centerpiece of the “new Middle East.”

She said that the carnage there represented the “birth pangs of a new Middle East, and whatever we do we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one.” Yet everything in the Middle East seems to be reeling backward in a scary way, and neocons are once more mocking W. as a wimp who should blow off the State Department and blow up Syria and Iran.

Having inadvertently built up Iran with his failures in Iraq, W. is eager now to send Iran a shock-and-awe message through Israel.

I honestly think that last is part of what’s motivating the warmongers. As with their last epic failure, Vietnam, they believe their hands have been tied by a bunch of liberal generals and a pansy-ass populace who refuse to let them fight the way they need to fight. They see the Israelis as their personal Rottweilers and they want to let them off the chain.

The Israelis should ask themselves if they really want to do George W. Bush’s dirty work for him. I continue to suspect they did not expect that the US would give them the green light on this (it is insane, after all) and now they have no face saving way out. America did not do its job and now things are deteriorating beyond anyone’s control.

But, you know, we didn’t want to waste time with a cease fire that might not last longer than nine or ten months. Hey, all those kids might as well die today as next year, right?

Of course, it could also just be politics. It often is. The bridegroom is a-comin’ and the warmongers are chomping at the bit. The election is right around the corner and the Republican base is dying for WWIII. Well, not dying exactly. Somebody else is doing that. They are in the throes of le petit mort — a different thing entirely.

And I can’t help but be reminded of this:

“God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Update: Here’s another “clarifying moment” for everyone:

President Bush Saturday again blamed Hezbollah for the crisis but said responsibility must also be shared by Syria and Iran, which support and provide weapons to the militant Shiite Muslim political and military organization. “Their actions threaten the entire Middle East and stand in the way of resolving the current crisis and bringing lasting peace to this troubled region,” he said in his weekly radio address from his ranch in Crawford, Tex.

[…]

Bush said again that the United States is pressuring Israel to use care “to protect innocent lives and is concerned that the warfare is putting Lebanon’s democratic government in peril.

They sure have a funny way of making that point:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

Yah think?

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