Condoleezza Rice Grilled at Confirmation Hearings
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee started confirmation hearings yesterday for Condoleezza Rice’s appointment as America’s next Secretary of State. Her suitability for the position is doubtful, and her judgment is questionable at best. However, the significant point raised by the first morning of hearings is the fundamental disagreement between the Bush White House and Congressional Democrats on just what reality is.
Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) said he would vote for confirmation and expected her to be the next Secretary of State. At the same time, he observed
We inspire as much envy and resentment as we do admiration and gratitude, even if we do everything correctly, in my view. But the fact is relations with many of our oldest friends are, quite frankly, scraping the bottom right now, and we need to heed the advice of the president of the United States just before his first inaugural when he talked about acting with humility as well as force.
This doesn’t really line up with what Dr. Rice said in her opening statement, viz.
September 11, 2001, was a defining moment for our nation and the world. Under the vision and leadership of President Bush, our nation has risen to meet the challenges of our time: fighting tyranny and terror, and securing the blessings of freedom and prosperity for a new generation.
The nation is too busy watching “Desperate Housewives” and “American Idol” while waiting for the Super Bowl to have risen up. As one analyst put it, the nation isn’t at war, the military is (no rationing, no blackouts, no meaningful security on mass transit, but over 1,300 Americans dead and over 10,000 wounded). Still, Dr. Rice bowed slightly to reality as she said
Now is the time to build on these achievements to make the world safer, and to make the world more free [sic]. We must use American diplomacy to help create a balance of power in the world that favors freedom. And the time for diplomacy is now.
Now is the time for diplomacy because the military is busy fighting in the Iraqi Civil War, and there is no way to use any other means to pursue America’s national interests. And logically a balance of power doesn’t favor anything; an imbalance of power would favor freedom. The joke used to be that an Iranian moderate was a hardliner who was reloading. Perhaps a diplomat in the Bush administration is a neo-con who can’t find any military resources to throw at a problem.
© Copyright 2005 by
The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without
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