buzzflash calls Rice - Scheherazade Sec. of State

[donsu]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/17/AR2006121700973.html

A New Mideast, or Wishful Thinking?

By Fred Hiatt


Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice obviously thinks that former secretary of state James Baker just doesn't get how the Mideast has changed since he last plied the peacemaking shuttle 15 years ago.

That's one thing that becomes clear when you listen to her talk for any length of time, as she did during a visit to The Post last week. Of course she makes it clear in characteristic Rice fashion: polite, correct, not personal -- but also forceful and eloquent and unmistakable.

-snip-

Not so, Rice says. "The United States has always been most effective when it is leading both from power and principle," she said. And: "I don't see how the United States of America can ever back off of that commitment in the search somehow for stability -- which I am quite certain will be a false stability." The false stability, she implies, of accommodating dictators in Syria and Iran.

-snip-

You can't help but be impressed as you listen to Rice discourse on how the region has changed and why the old approaches won't work. You feel less certain, when she's finished, that she or her boss have come up with any alternatives that will.
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the snips hold all the hooey she speaks