| Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2006 6:13 am Post subject: Bush and Condi clash over Israel |
| http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/08/08/conservative-mag-bush-an_n_26822.html
http://www.insightmag.com/Media/MediaManager/Condi4.htm
Bush and Condi clash over Israel; president overrules her for the first time
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush during an Aug. 7 press conference in Crawford, Texas. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become increasingly dismayed over President Bush's support for Israel to continue its war with Hezbollah.
State Department sources said Ms. Rice has been repeatedly stymied in her attempts to pressure Israel to end strikes against Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon. The sources said the secretary's trip to the Middle East last week was torpedoed by the Israeli air strike of a Lebanese village in which 25 people were killed.
"I've never seen her so angry," an aide said.
The U.S. response to the Israeli-Hezbollah war was said to have divided both the administration as well as the family of President George W. Bush. At the same time, it marked the first time since Ms. Rice became secretary of state that the president has overruled her.
"For the last 18 months, Condi was given nearly carte blanche in setting foreign policy guidelines," a senior government source familiar with the issue said. "All of a sudden, the president has a different opinion and he wants the last word."
The disagreement between Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice is over the ramifications of U.S. support for Israel's continued offensive against Lebanon. The sources said Mr. Bush believes that Israel's failure to defeat Hezbollah would encourage Iranian adventurism in neighboring Iraq. Ms. Rice has argued that the United States would be isolated both in the Middle East and Europe at a time when the administration seeks to build a consensus against Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Instead, Ms. Rice believes the United States should engage Iran and Syria to pressure Hezbollah to end the war with Israel. Ms. Rice has argued that such an effort would result in a U.S. dialogue with Damascus and Tehran on Middle East stability.
"The United States and Israel must understand that it is not in their long-term interests to allow themselves to become isolated in the Middle East and the world," said Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Rice ally and senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "Both Damascus and Tehran must hear from America directly."
Ms. Rice has garnered support from several senior Republicans on the Foreign Relations Committee, including chairman Sen. Richard Lugar. Members of the inner circle of Mr. Bush's father, the former president, have also been advocating for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, with subsequent pressure on Israel for a diplomatic settlement with the Palestinians.
Ms. Rice's biggest supporter has been Brent Scowcroft, who served under the first Bush administration as national security advisor. Sources said Mr. Scowcroft, regarded as Ms. Rice's mentor, has been sending messages to his friends in Congress and the White House that U.S. support for the Israeli war could jeopardize relations with Gulf oil suppliers, particularly Saudi Arabia.
"A comprehensive peace settlement would not only defang the radicals in Lebanon and Palestine, and their supporters in other countries, it would also reduce the influence of Iran -- the country that, under its current ideology, poses the greatest potential threat to stability in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt and Jordan," Mr. Scowcroft wrote in a column in the Washington Post on July 30.
The sources said Mr. Bush's position has been supported by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and to a lesser extent National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. They have urged the president to hold off international pressure and give Israel more time to cause strategic damage to Hezbollah as well as Iranian and Syrian interests in Lebanon.
"I think if you think of what's happening in Lebanon and Israel right now, you see the face of the beginning of the 21st century," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a radio interview on Aug. 2.
Aides for Mr. Cheney have argued that the United States should have targeted Hezbollah and Syria during the war against Iraq in 2003. They said despite U.S. intelligence warnings Hezbollah was allowed to dominate Lebanon and build a formidable force along the Israeli border.
"There was talk of taking care of Hezbollah and Syria, but Condi and [then-Secretary of State Colin] Powell said 'no way. We don't need another front,'" an official said.
Mr. Bush's support for Israel has also struck a chord with most Americans. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll reported that 59 percent supported Israel in the war against Hezbollah and only 13 percent of respondents backed an immediate ceasefire.
But the sources said Mr. Bush has been dismayed by the Israeli failure to defeat Hezbollah. They said several high-ranking Republicans have expressed amazement at the plodding Israeli advance into Lebanon.
"One Jewish friend of Bush actually called up a senior Israeli official and began yelling, 'What the hell's going on here,'" a source said. "'Are you going to fight or what?'"
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Bamford discusses 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda on MSNBC's 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann':
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/08/07/bamford-discusses-a-clean-break-on-msnbc-s-countdown.php
"A Clean Break" :
What is "A Clean Break?" Author James Bamford explains on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's Countdown show:
http://www.corvuswire.com/cleanbreak.htm
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August 8, 2006
Condi's 'New Middle East'
by Patrick J. Buchanan
"Things are as they are, and their consequences will be what they will be. Why then should we seek to be deceived?"
Columnist Stewart Alsop, dead now these 30 years, once closed a column with this quote from the philosopher Bishop Berkeley. His column, I believe, was about Vietnam.
As we approach the fifth anniversary of 9/11, we, too, can see the shape of things to come.
In the ideology of "democratic fundamentalism" to which George W. Bush converted after 9/11, we are simply in a rough patch on the glory road to a democratic Middle East and "the end of tyranny on this earth."
In reality, our situation has never been more grim.
The successful experiment that featured the "freest, fairest elections ever held" in Palestine is dead. Over 125 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The Gaza Strip is a shambles. The terror wing of Hamas will have no trouble recruiting in the rubble.
The same is true of Lebanon. The "Cedar Revolution" was a Bush success, a beacon of hope. That Hezbollah won a dozen seats only seemed to prove that the elections had indeed been free, fair, and open to all.
Now Lebanon is in ruins. The 900 dead, thousands wounded, the million refugees, the smashed infrastructure, and the scores of thousands of Westerners who have fled means years before Lebanon recovers, if ever she does. Arab hatred of Israel and America is pandemic.
Hezbollah ignited the hostilities. But it was Israel that escalated to rain destruction on a people and nation that had not countenanced or condoned Hezbollah's provocation, but condemned it.
Think back. Had Reagan done to Lebanon, when half a dozen Americans were seized as hostages, what Israel has done, when two soldiers were taken hostage, Democrats would have denounced Reagan as a war criminal. Conservatives would have begged him to ease up.
Yet, almost to a man and woman, our politicians are falling all over one another to express their 100 percent support of what Israel has done to Lebanon. Even Israelis must feel a measure of contempt for this kind of groveling.
Indeed, in Israel, dissent against the blitzkrieg is rising, and the Olmert regime is being challenged and even condemned by courageous Israelis for letting the air force have a free hand to smash Lebanon.
Moving on to Iraq, where the war has lasted as long as our war on Nazi Germany, Gen. John Abizaid is warning that a descent into civil war is now possible, and Bush concedes that, three years and three months after "Mission Accomplished," the situation in Baghdad is "terrible."
Questions now on the table are: Will America let go? Will Iraq break apart? Americans are not all that far away from a strategic disaster.
Whatever happens to Joe Lieberman in Connecticut, the new center of gravity of the Democratic Party is antiwar. Democratic hawks are a dying species. Al Gore now emerges, given his authentic antiwar credentials and emergence as a world leader of the global warming movement, as the Left's best hope for the nomination.
Kerry and Edwards, the 2004 ticket, know which way the wind is blowing. Both have declared that had they known in 2002 what they know today, they would not have voted for the war. Hillary senses the ground shifting beneath her feet. Last week, she scourged Rumsfeld, called for his resignation, and denounced Pentagon mismanagement of the war.
Two years and three months before November 2008, the Democratic Party has pulled out of the Bush coalition; two-thirds of the nation considers Iraq a mistake; and a majority wants the troops home.
Can Bush sustain support for the war as the news from Iraq gets worse and worse? For, if this war is lost on the home front, the war will be lost in Mesopotamia.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are fighting in larger units and, colluding with drug lords, killing more Afghans and allied troops than they have in five years. Hamid Karzai reigns in Kabul but does not rule. U.S.-NATO forces are not losing battles, but they are insufficient in number to win the war.
Iran, fearful of Bush in 2003, is now rejecting U.S.-EU bribes and rejecting any suspension of its uranium enrichment program. Bring it on, Ahmadinejad seems to be saying to Bush. As for Pakistan, the Islamists there remain but a bullet away from custody of an atomic bomb.
While all these are trends, none seem to be going our way.
The Israeli-American ace of trumps, raw military power, is still able to defeat armies and destroy states, but it has proven less effective in eradicating guerrillas, and counterproductive in changing Islamic hearts and minds.
If neither U.S. party is willing to show any independence of Israel, if America will not address the root causes of Arab animosity, and if we will not even negotiate with our enemies, we should probably pack up and get out of the Middle East. Before we are thrown out.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/buchanan | |
