Has anybody else noticed how often top Bush and Blair administration staff run away to Baghdad whenever the heat is on at home? Blair and Rumsfled [sic] have done it countless times, now Condi Rice is doing it.
TIME says Rice is "trying to look busy".
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East, hoping to bolster Arab moderates... So what are her chances of success? Let's just say it's probably easier finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than finding any Arabs or Israelis optimistic over Rice's prospects.She certainly does not seem to have anything new to offer Bush's embattled supporters in Iraq:
"Our role ... is to support all the parties and indeed to press all of the parties to work towards that resolution quickly, because obviously the security situation is not one that can be tolerated and is not one that is being helped by political inaction," she told reporters travelling with her.Hopefully those same reporters will keep pressing her about that July 10, 2001 with George Tenet. To quote 1115.org:
If you’d had respect for their opinion instead of contempt, you might have listened. And you might have done something more than sit on your bloody behind.
What you did instead was decide that you were the proper judge of what inference should be drawn from all the available intelligence information. You decided that urgency couldn’t possibly be warranted because there was no new threat information. You decided to overrule the intelligence experts.
Rumsfeld couldn’t leave war to the generals. And now we have that whole never-ending mess in Iraq. You couldn’t leave intelligence to the intelligence professionals. And now we have the never-ending mess that is The War On Terror.
The whole point, dear Condi, is that it doesn’t bloody matter if there’s no new threat information. If the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency comes to you and pushes the panic button based on existing information, you bloody well listen to him. You don’t substitute your fancy-pants amateur judgment for the collective judgment of the intelligence professionals.
