Robert Scheer: Labor Pains of a Stillborn Foreign Policy

[kpete]

Robert Scheer: Labor Pains of a Stillborn Foreign Policy

Posted on Jul 25, 2006
By Robert Scheer

Editor’s note: In this column, Truthdig editor in chief Robert Scheer argues that Condoleezza Rice, in calling the Israel-Lebanon crisis simply the “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” underscored the Bush administration’s blindness to the disastrous effects its foreign policy has wrought.


The Bush foreign policy, from coddling Pakistan’s nuclear bomb-making to cheerleading Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, is in a free fall of such alarming consequence that it may be difficult to grasp.

Certainly that is the case for President Bush, who has been reduced to helplessly hoping the United Nations can get Syria “to stop doing this s---,” and for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who blithely announced Monday that we are just watching the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

By Rice’s logic, Hurricane Katrina was just the labor contractions of the new New Orleans. All the Mideast needs now, apparently, is a nice epidural and some ice chips to suck on.

The mass media similarly have lost the thread, treating the downward spiral of violent madness in the world as little more than an exciting — and profitable — war story, demanding slick logos and montages of explosions set to rock music. It’s also convenient to the neoconservatives, who prattle on about this being World War III, allowing them to silence critics, justify torture and invade privacy while conveniently covering for the failure of their Iraq invasion to produce the U.S.-friendly democracies they promised. Any hope that Rice’s ascendancy in the Bush administration signaled a more sensible direction for U.S. foreign policy has been exposed as wishful thinking.

more at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060725_robert_scheer_labor_pains/

[izzie]

1. Can any one figure out what Bush has in his mind?

It is like he gets bored with some thing after a week and goes back to bombing every one to being a democracy but he even has his own view on what that is as he does run around his own constitution. It is all just one big mess.