Addressing America's "Deeper Malignancies"

[Echo In Light]

Addressing America's "Deeper Malignancies"
By Walter C. Uhler

17/06/08 "ICH" -- If you want to know what's wrong with the foreign policy establishment in the United States, look no further than Condoleezza Rice's article, "The New American Realism," http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080701faessay87401-p0/condoleezza-rice/rethinking-the-national-interest.html published in the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs." Not only has the Council on Foreign Relations spread its pages wide open for an infamous interventionist -- a lying and deceitful enabler of the Bush administration's illegal, immoral unprovoked invasion of Iraq - it also readmitted Ms. Rice without requiring anything resembling a mea culpa for the crimes against humanity that have lowered her, the Bush administration and the United States to the depths of moral disrepute around the world.

Why publish the words of a liar and alleged war criminal? Who takes her seriously? Was her article accepted for publication because of her high position in the thoroughly discredited and morally bankrupt Bush administration? Or was publication a "no brainer," simply because the foreign policy elite at the Council on Foreign Relations actually shares Ms. Rice's smug interventionist conceit?

Whatever the excuse, it doesn't pass the smell test. Why? Because Rice's unimaginative, evasive and euphemism-riddled whitewash of Bush's disastrous "Time of Troubles" would barely merit a grade of "C" in any freshman course devoted to U.S. foreign policy.

Ms. Rice's case is not a matter of affirmative action encountering the Peter Principle. Instead, it's a matter of compensating for the Peter Principle with poorly disguised moral turpitude. For example, during the propaganda run up to the invasion of Iraq, Ms Rice lied when she said that the aluminum tubes sought by Iraq could "only" be used in nuclear weapons. We know she lied, because her assertion came after she learned of the disagreements within the intelligence community about how such tubes might be used.

Ms Rice also attempted to deceive members of the House of Representatives. She told them that, after 9/11, the U.S. had no choice, but to engage in what the September 2002 National Security Strategy euphemistically called "preemptive" wars. As we now know, the euphemism of preemption was a fig leaf for the "preventive" wars - otherwise known as wars of aggression - which the Bush administration actually intended to launch.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20109.htm