Neocon Nutballs In Full Effect
by digby
So, the long knives are out for Miss Condi:
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.
“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.
What is he, 10? Is he seriously suggesting that we should launch a military attack for “viciously describing things in public?”
Mr. Gingrich … 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.”
Several of the critics have urged that Mr. Bush provide a high-profile post to James Baker, who was secretary of state under the administration of Mr. Bush’s father. They cited Mr. Baker’s determination to confront Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 1990.
A leading public critic of Miss Rice has been Richard Perle, a former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and regarded as close to Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Perle, pointing to the effort by the State Department to undermine the Reagan administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, has accused Miss Rice of succumbing to a long-time State Department agenda of meaningless agreements meant to appease enemies of the United States.
“Condoleezza Rice has moved from the White House to Foggy Bottom, a mere mile or so away,” Mr. Perle wrote in a June 25 Op-Ed article in the Washington Post that has been distributed throughout conservative and national security circles. “What matters is not that she is further removed from the Oval Office; Rice’s influence on the president is undiminished. It is, rather, that she is now in the midst of “and increasingly represents” a diplomatic establishment that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement of our adversaries.”
Mr. Perle’s article was said to have reflected the views of many of Mr. Bush’s appointees in the White House, Defense Department and State Department. Mr. Perle maintains close contacts to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Robert Joseph, Deputy National Security Advisor Elliot Abrams and Mr. Cheney’s national security adviser, John Hannah.
A major problem, critics said, is Miss Rice’s ignorance of the Middle East. They said the secretary relies completely on Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who is largely regarded as the architect of U.S. foreign policy. Miss Rice also consults regularly with her supporters on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Richard Lugar and the No. 2 Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.[…]
The critics within the administration expect a backlash against Miss Rice that could lead to her transfer in wake of the congressional elections in 2006. They said by that time even Mr. Bush will recognize the failure of relying solely on diplomacy in the face of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“At that point, Rice will be openly blamed and Bush will have a very hard time defending her,” said a GOP source with close ties to the administration.
They’re all 10.
Look, I think Condi Rice is a bad Secretary of State, but not for those reasons. She’s a bad Secretary of State because she is loyal to a delusional moron and can’t contain the crazies like those who are speaking in that article. If she really is some sort of dovish appeaser, she certainly has been ineffectual. She has been, after all, the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State for the last five years of non-stop warfare.
But this isn’t really about Condi anyway. Remember Newtie’s speech to AEI right after the invasion?
It’s been barely a week since the U.S. took control of Baghdad, but the Pentagon is already embroiled in a new war, this time with the State Department…
Gingrich, who is close to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, aimed the full fury of his rhetorical fire at the State Department, accusing it of actively subverting President George W. Bush’s agenda in Iraq and beyond.“The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success,” Gingrich charged, adding, “Now the State Department is back at work pursuing policies that will clearly throw away all the fruits of hard-won victory.”
It was a stunning attack from someone so closely identified with Rumsfeld and the neo-conservative hawks around him. “I’ve never seen a wholesale attack on America’s entire diplomatic establishment like this,” said Charles Kupchan, a foreign-policy expert at Georgetown University. “This is fundamentally about ideology and the efforts of the neo-conservatives to institutionalize their victories over the moderate and liberal internationalists.”
[…]
Kupchan also said it was unlikely that Gingrich, as a member of the Policy Board, would not have cleared his remarks with top officials. The fact that Gingrich’s remarks were leaked to the Washington Post in advance is also highly significant. So is his choice of venue. The AEI — where Gingrich is a Fellow — is where Bush presented his most comprehensive proposal yet for democratizing Iraq and the Arab world nearly two months ago. It is also home to the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle and several other neo-conservative analysts who have been the most outspoken about promoting “regime change” in the Middle East and U.S. military dominance in the world.
Gingrich was careful to insist that he was not faulting Secretary of State Colin Powell, whom he depicted as a prisoner of the Department and its Near East bureau. But he charged that the administration was split between two “worldviews”: the State Department worldview as one of “process, politeness, and accommodation,” and president’s worldview was that of “facts, values and outcomes.” [hahaha — d] Gingrich said that the Pentagon appeared far more faithful to the latter. When the State Department failed to persuade key allies, such as Turkey, South Korea, France and Germany to support Washington, it was the Pentagon who brought along Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, according to Gingrich, thus making it far easier to go to war. “The military delivered diplomatically and then the military delivered militarily in a stunning, four-week campaign,” he declared.
Damn, these neos really smoke the good shit, don’t they? And they are so high they just keep on being obliviously wrong in exactly the same way, decade after decade.
Whether they will succeed in mau-mauing Condi and/or persuading Bush that she’s making him look like a wimp is anybody’s guess. He’s just that stupid and he might believe it. I suspect the real problem is that Junior may not trust Uncle Dick the way he once did and that means that the neos are probably going to have to do better than this to really get their war on. The best they can hope for is that through continued incompetence and incoherence, their greatest desire — World War III — will start by accident.
Hey, a lil’ neocon boy can dream, can’t he?
Oh and by the way, I’m looking forward to hearing the shrieks and bellows from noted civil rights activist Ann Coulter that criticizing Condi Rice for being incompetent is racist.
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