Everybody seems to want a piece of Condoleezza Rice and to want to blame her for the failures of the Bush Foreign policy. Eugene Robinson writes in his column in the Washington Post that the current conflict is Condi's war:
It was Rice who waited more than a week, giving Israel time to pound the daylights out of Lebanon, before finding time to visit Beirut and Tel Aviv and attend a crisis summit in Rome. It was Rice who spent her trip categorically ruling out a quick cease-fire, which made one wonder if she really needed to travel at all, since she could have just thumbed out a text message: "2 soon 2 stop boom boom."
The most significant development from Rice's swing through the region was that she took personal ownership of the bloody, escalating war between Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas with a single breathtaking pronouncement:
"It is time for a new Middle East. It is time to say to those who do not want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail, they will not."
Take a moment to absorb those two sentences. The bit about how "we will prevail" is just standard chest-thumping from the Bush administration, the equivalent of George W. Bush's "bring it on" challenge to the Iraqi insurgents. It's the "new Middle East" part, which she repeated at every opportunity, that makes this Condi's war and that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who has more than a passing knowledge of the region.
Tom Friedman joins the choir of critics by writing, “Condoleezza Rice must have been severely jet-lagged when she said that what’s going on in Lebanon and Iraq today were the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Oh, I wish it were so. What we are actually seeing are the rebirth pangs of the old Middle East, only fueled now by oil and more destructive weaponry.” I think that all of these people have forgotten that Condi Rice isn't the president and that she might be the chief of American Diplomacy, but that she follows the orders or rather the ideology of her boss, President Bush. I believe that the Bush administration just doesn't believe in diplomacy and that it is adverse to compromise, to negotiations, to be involved in forum where it will not have all the control and where it will have to talk to countries, which it doesn't want to talk.
It must be very frustrating for Rice to be Secretary of State and to be limited to using glamour and big dreams for the future for the Middle East to try to stop a conflict, which she is too intelligent and too smart not to know demands more. I do not agree with Condi Rice on everything, but I believe that she knows what she believes and what approach she wants to use in most conflicts. The one thing that we can say about the approach, which the US took to the conflict so far, is that it was confusing and that it reflected ambivalence about what to do. The culprit for this ambivalence is the President who didn't know what he wanted to do and not Condi Rice who probably he had to wait for her boss to make up his mind. Condi Rice is trying to do her best to make an incoherent and shallow foreign policy look coherent and substantive. Condi Rice is a public servant, her role is to serve the international interests of the United States as defined by President Bush, and that is what she is doing. The unfortunate thing is that she is a competent woman who always does her job superbly and in this case, her talents are at the service of a policy that will NOT serve the interests of the United States.
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