Editorial: Why we need Condi more than ever

John Ashcroft, Tom Ridge, Scott McClellan, Harriet Miers, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Porter Goss, Karl Rove, and now Tony Snow.  Surely I left a few out.  These are the major faces that said 'no' to staying on for the remainder of Bush's second term.  As most progressives would agree, these individuals were beyond a doubt corrupt, and helped dismantle a US political system that was supposed to be based on checks and balances.

Then again, who are we left with?  All of those people were influential figures.  Bush listened to them.  Sometimes they helped off-set the influence of Dick Cheney -- which is really the key issue here.  With all of them gone, the only person standing in the way of Dick Cheney is Condoleezza Rice.  As inept as she is at understanding the complicated world we live in, she is at least calling for a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear standoff.  This month, several worried Administration officials leaked to the press that Dick Cheney is pressing Bush to strike certain targets in Iran.  I would not be surprised if the leakers came from inside Rice's State Department.

Really though, think cause and effect.  If we strike Iran, other than making it harder for us in Iraq, Ahmadinejad will attack Israel.  If Israel gets attacked, Bush will help them fight back.  Middle Easterners will view it as a holy war, possibly forcing moderate governments like Jordan to pick a side, and then all bets are off.

Getting back to the larger point, this is the one and only downside of all the Bush loyalists leaving the Executive Branch.  Bush is closer to Cheney than ever before.  The only dissenting voice standing in the way is Condoleezza Rice and the US State Department.  The actions we take against Iran will have huge foreign policy implications for the next generation.  And I don't feel any better about things now that more cabinet members are resigning.

In politics, not just foreign affairs, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  It's mentally exhausting to even think this -- but Condi, you go get 'em girl!

Comments

[Jon]

Condi is our great aegis?! We're screwed. With the others gone all of Cheney's focus can go into undermining her views or pushing her out of the door. What we need is an inner circle that looked like Bill Clinton's which had people with competence and a diverse set of views. Condi may be on the right side of the Iran issue but does she have the political fortitude and competence to play this well? Past events don't bode well in my opinion.

[cyrus michaels]

When are people going to realize that dick has been running the show all along?, bush has been dick and carl's puppet from the start!

That is why we are in such mess.

[section9]

No wonder the Democrats got rolled by the Persians during the Carter years....

Rice gets the same intelligence that Gates, Bush, and Cheney get. Unfortunately, they get it from a hideously incompetent CIA, the one that got all of our operatives rolled up by the Revolutionary Guards back in the Clinton days. So she has to rely to some extent on the Israelis and the Turks and whatever the Jordanians can give her. After two years of diplomacy with Iran, Rice is confronting what the Iranian leadership is desperate for: a limited war with the United States in which it survives a short air campaign and comes out on top.

She has advised the President not to attack Iran on their terms and on their timetable. The Iranians have been peddling weapons to the Syrians, Hezboallah, and their friends in Iraq. The Iranian smuggling of EFP's and other weapons to the Jaish al-Mahdhi, as well as to AQI, has been going on for at least the past two years (liberals disbelieve this, but the confiscation of Iranian manufactured ordinance is being done at the battalion level now...). If Iran wanted a genuinely new relationship with American, they would be helpful; instead, they engage in continued provocation.

Everyone, Rice included, understands that Ahmadhi-Nejad and the Revolutionary Guards Corps Circle, backed up in the Council of Guardians by Ayatollah Yazdi, look at a military confrontation with the Americans as their salvation from domestic difficulties. There are national elections coming up in 2009, after all. Rice's diplomacy is all about allowing the Iranians to make the first, overt hostile act. She does not want Bush to repeat the mistake of pre-emption, which goes against the American grain, and has needlessly divided the American People over Iraq. She understands in ways that liberals don't the poisoned political atmosphere in Washington and also recognizes that this encourages Iranian recklessness and adventurism. The Michael Ledeen "Faster Please" crowd that fronts for the Israel Lobby doesn't understand this. Nor, I might add, does the IDF General Staff and the frighteningly incompetent Government of Ehud Olmert, which is drawing up strike plans for their long range F-15 unit, "Force 69", for a short, sharp, Iran campaign against the atomic sites (Natanz, Bushehr, and Arak, respectively).

There are rivals to Ahmadhi-Nejad and the Guards within the Iranian political leadership. They simply don't have the upper hand right now. Condi is trying to forstall an attack to make sure that Ahmadhi-Nejad's rivals have time to overwhelm him. Unfortunately, Ahmadhi-Nejad is also aware of this, which may explain the rearmament of Hezboallah, the Syrians, and the series of executions that occurred in Iran over the last fortnight.

All of you assume that Cheney, Bush, and Rice are the Bad Guys. That is because you are trapped in your partisan Wilderness of Mirrors. None of you have any remote idea of what is actually going on. Ahmadhi-Nejad will have war, one way or another, because he needs war more than he needs peace. To him, peace is entropy-things fall apart for him and the Guards: continued inflation, housing shortages, voters complaining about foreign aid to the Hez and the Syrians, money being diverted from the mouths of the poor to the Atomic Bomb program, and the complete disaffection of an entire generation of young people from the ideals of the War and Revolution Generation. The latter are looking for Change and not seeing it from the Guards. And don't think that the bazaaris aren't complaining about all the fat contracts and the big business deals going to well-connected members of the Revolutionary Guards. It's become a racket. Most serious is the long range decline in Iranian oil production-something that explains the Iranian desire for a conquest of the Iraqi fields.

Rice and Gates have convinced Bush, and to some extent, even Cheney (he serves as a useful bogeyman to the Iranians) of the wisdom of Mr. Lincoln's admonition to Secretary of State Seward during the Alabama affair. Seward wanted a preemptive war against Britain because she built a blockade runner for the Confederacy. Mr. Lincoln, upon hearing Seward's reasoning, smiled and remarked, "One war at a time, Mr. Seward."