A Love Letter To Condi From "The Old Gray Lady"

(By the way, I also posted over here today.)

As far as I’m concerned, the New York Times committed a journalistic atrocity in its Sunday Magazine section yesterday (and I’m not even talking about Deborah Solomon’s interview with Karl Rove, which, aside from the fact that the decision to interview a moral leper like Rove is bad enough, was made worse by the fact that the interview wasn’t even interesting because Rove will never give away anything that can hurt him).

What I’m referring to is its “exit interview” with outgoing (happily) Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. There were so many unanswered assertions and examples of Bushco-friendly spin that I don’t believe that it will be possible for me to answer them all in a single post. And the worst remarks didn’t even come from Rice herself, but from someone named Daniel Fried (I’ll get to him shortly – “Welcome To My World, Barack”??).

To begin, here’s what Fried has to say…

The West does not go out and conquer countries by using force, try to deprive countries of a choice. It didn’t insist that Poland join NATO. Poland wanted to join NATO. It didn’t impose NATO membership or E.U. membership on Estonia; Estonia chose it. That’s a difference, and it’s a moral difference as well. . . . If you validate the assumptions of Russians who believe that the only proper relationship between Russia and its neighbors is one of subordination and intimidation, then how do you expect a more cooperative Russia to emerge in the future?

Oh, and by the way, speaking of “not conquering countries by using force,” it sounds as if the Iraqi Parliament has ratified the agreement stipulating that our forces will be gone by 2011 here (of course, since we didn’t “conquer them by using force,” such a date should be arbitrary, since we could leave whenever we want, right?).

(In a little more than two months, we’ll be governed by grownups again, people; just keeping hanging onto that – as the saying goes, tell me lies that are slight shades of the truth; don’t tell me lies that insult my intelligence.)

And speaking of a “more cooperative Russia,” it should be noted that President Medvedev has called upon President-Elect Obama to pursue better relations here.

Actually, this and other comments by Fried are surprising, since he has a pretty good record in foreign service, though he is decidedly a hawk (which will be obvious the more I dig into this “interview”).

Also, here’s another gem from Fried…

An Obama presidency will be greeted in Europe with enthusiasm, but as some Europeans have put it to me, “We realize that we won’t have the excuse of George Bush.” Obama made it clear during his trip to Europe that he wants to work with Europe, but any American president is going to think globally, and Obama, from what I know of his team, is a freedom Democrat. He believes in a values-based foreign policy. He’s going to want Europe to stand up and do more. . . . And Europeans will have a problem, in that they will embrace him, and they will not be able to say: “Well, this is the Bush administration. We have to resist.”

Uh, do I detect just a bit of sour grapes here?

Before Assistant Secretary of State Fried starts blaming Europeans for things they have yet to do, let’s keep the following in mind from Der Spiegel here...

President Bush, who may well be the worst president in the history of the United States (a view held by historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, for example), has brought the country's reputation to an all-time low worldwide. In the eyes of much of the world, the America of George W. Bush is no longer a beacon of democracy. Instead, it stands for contempt for international law (because of the US's unilateral war in Iraq), torture at Abu Ghraib, bending the law in Guantanamo and selfish environmental policies that do more harm than good to the world's climate.

...

Statistics support the dramatic decline in the US's reputation. Less than half of the populations of all Western European countries, 30 percent of Germans and only 8 percent of Turkish citizens have a positive view of the United States. This negative assessment apparently has nothing or very little to do with the often-cited anti-Americanism to which conservatives like to attribute the US's image loss. When George W. Bush began his first term in January 2001, 78 percent of Germans still had a positive view of the United States. This general fondness for Americans remains high today.

And that to me is nothing short of a miracle, but there you are.

Also, here is another item to note from the “interview”…

I think the first thing the next president will have to do is understand that Afghanistan is now part of a regional problem. Maybe four or five years ago it was about Afghanistan, but now it’s about Afghanistan and Pakistan, and you can’t deal with one without dealing with the other.

…

So the question is with all of this capability there, why do we have the sense that we’re backsliding? The top of my list is the drugs and narcotics, which are, without question, the economic engine that fuels the resurgent Taliban, and the crime and corruption in the country. . . . We couldn’t even talk about that in 2006 when I was there. That was not a topic that anybody wanted to talk about, including the U.S.

And why the hell not, anyway? Particularly considering the fact that at about that time (as noted here), the Afghan drug gangs were fortifying themselves more than the Taliban itself.

(By the way, that observation was made by General James L. Jones, who was named as a special envoy for Middle East security by Rice last year. And I do not mean to criticize him here; actually, I give him credit for admitting yet another idiotic blunder by his superiors.)

And so what of Our Gal Condi anyway, as long as I’m devoting all of this time to her minions?

Well, as the Times tells us straight from Condi herself…

…I think the structure is there, I think the Annapolis structure is a very powerful structure . . . On the Palestinian-Israeli issue, we will leave this in a much, much better place, agreement or no.

Well, as this tells us (and to me, the headline says it all)…

After months of publicly insisting that an agreement still could be sealed by the year-end deadline set by the two sides and Bush last November in Annapolis, Md., U.S. officials said Thursday for the first time it would have to wait.

"We do not think it is likely it will happen before the end of the year," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in Washington after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged as much at the start of a Mideast trip.

And when it comes to the "department of the obvious," rest assured that Perino would never confirm that water was actually wet until she was just about to drown (and I don't wish ill on her, just speaking figuratively - I mean, she still won't admit we're in a recesssion, people).

And as the AP story tells us, many of the foreign policy players of the incoming Obama administration worked for President Clinton also, so my guess is that they’ll scrap the “framework,” “structure,” or whatever it’s being called this week by Bushco and start over anyway, especially with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert leaving anyway under a cloud of scandal.

There are more choice items in this whole piece, and I’ll get to them later.

Update 11/18/08: Nice to see that Condi is keeping herself busy here (would it be too snarky of me to wonder how soon Griffey Jr. will end up hurt performing his duties and try to go on the disabled list?).