Iran, Syria and Liberals Oh My!

Let's Start off today with some Rice.

CNN.com - Rice: U.S. will defeat insurgency, rebuild Iraq - Oct 19, 2005: "WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday defended U.S. policy in Iraq amid criticism from lawmakers demanding a plan to bring troops home.

In her first appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since February, Rice said the U.S. goals in Iraq are to break the back of the insurgency, keep Iraq from becoming a safe haven for Islamic extremism, turn the corner economically and become a democratic example for the entire Middle East.

She outlined a strategy to clear the toughest areas of insurgents, secure them as a sanctuary from violence and 'build durable national Iraqi institutions,' which she insisted would 'assure victory.'

'Our strategy is to clear, hold and build,' she told senators. 'The enemy's strategy is to infect, terrorize and pull down.'

The Afghanistan model

The WHAT!!! Does that mean we are going to crochet blankets or turn Iraq into a narco-state? If the latter do we chalk up a win in the Terror War AND a loss in the Drug War?

Rice said the Bush administration would 'restructure' part of its mission on a model the United States found successful in Afghanistan, where diplomats and reconstruction workers are embedded with the military.

'Provincial reconstruction teams' made up of civilian and military personnel will work together to clear out insurgents, train police, set up courts and help the government establish basic services, Rice said. The first of these new teams will begin work next month.

But the hearing often turned contentious, with Rice facing tough questioning from senators on both sides of the aisle, looking for a timetable to win the peace and begin withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Last I checked Afghanistan was spiraling into becoming a narco-state and the Taliban was regaining some of its former power. In what way was Afghanistan a success for the US?

Timetables debated

Rice refused to give a timeline for U.S. withdrawal but called Iraqi forces' assumption of responsibility for some of the toughest areas in Iraq 'good benchmarks'

But the Republican committee chair, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, countered that 'the American people need to more fully understand the basis upon which our troops are likely to come home.'

'We are engaged in a difficult mission in Iraq and the president and Congress must be clear with the American people about the stakes involved and the difficulties yet to come," he said.

Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said that nobody was suggesting an immediate pullout of U.S. troops, but more details on the Bush administration's plan to win the peace and begin withdrawing troops were needed.

"What's the plan, Stan? Tell us," Biden said. "We are not setting timetables and saying cut and run. We are saying give us a plan."

Asked pointedly whether the United States would still have troops in Iraq five or 10 years from now, Rice said, "I think that even to try and speculate on how many years from now there will be a certain number of American forces is not appropriate.

"I don't know how to speculate about what will happen 10 years from now, but I do believe that we are moving on a course on which Iraqi security forces are rather rapidly able to take care of their own security concerns."

Apparently we'll be done when the prez says we're done.

Syria and Iran

She reiterated U.S. criticism of Iraq's neighbors Syria and Iran, who she said need to take steps to stop fighters from entering Iraq.

"Syria and, indeed, Iran must decide whether they wish to side with the cause of war or with the cause of peace," she said.

While Rice said the United States is continuing to put diplomatic pressure on Syria to stem the flow of insurgents, the military option remains on the table. The United States also wants Syria to stop supporting Palestinian extremist groups and end its presence in Lebanon.

Rice said the United States is examining whether its ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, should hold diplomatic talks with Iranian officials about the situation in Iraq, just as he did during the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

Iran and Syria have been in the plans for a while as you know if you go just a step or two beyond the MSM to get your news. Now the government is officially saying it. Wait for official word on a draft in the not too distant future. (watch the terminology though as the Republicans don't like the D-word.

'Spin of false expectations'

In response to her comments that a free Iraq would "be at the heart of a different kind of Middle East" and allow the United States to defeat the ideology of hatred and extremism threatening it, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-California, accused Rice of "rewriting history."

Boxer said the Bush administration's war on terror was supposed to be about going after the terrorists that threatened the United States after the September 11 attacks, not "rebuilding the Middle East."

"Our country is sick at heart with the spin of false expectations," she told Rice.

The secretary also faced criticism from senators for failing to appear before the committee for so many months. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, pointed out that if Rice made time to appear on Sunday morning talk shows, she could make herself available to address Congress about a policy that is costing the lives of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis and "draining our treasury substantially."

"This is just unacceptable we go this length of time without discussing this in full and in the public," Dodd said.

It is nice to see our senate so worked up about something . Demand answers folks. We want them, We need them, and we deserve them.


Nest an excerpt from and interview with Douglass Massey. The man has some GOOD ideas. Read on.

AlterNet: Start Making Sense: Return of the 'L' Word: An Interview with Douglas Massey: "Return of the 'L' Word: An Interview with Douglas Massey By Bradford Plumer, MotherJones.com. Posted August 16, 2005.
Liberals need a vision for the new century, says Douglas Massey.

MJ: Let's shift over to the political landscape. You see the conservative movement today as being spearheaded by what you call a variety of fundamentalisms. Can you explain what those are?

DM: Yeah, I did a lot of reading trying to understand fundamentalism, and there was one interesting scholar I ran across—Martin Marty of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago—who spent more than a decade studying fundamentalisms around the world. Basically fundamentalism is not about religion, it's a political movement that often uses religion for political purposes. And fundamentalists are essentially all the same, whether you're talking Hindus or Buddhists or Muslims, Christians, Jews. They selectively draw from sacred texts to achieve political goals in the modern world. And they're essentially engaged in a war against modernism, against what has been accomplished through the modern liberal political economy—which includes the liberation of women, the end of the subordination of minorities, the end of privilege, all those things really disturb many fundamentalists. And they turn to religion as a way of marshalling their forces to attack all these things. So it's not about religion at all. And after that, I started seeing other types of fundamentalism in our political culture. There are the constitutional fundamentalists who now dominate our judiciary, and think that the Constitution was basically a sacred document, that we have to go back to what the Founding Fathers were thinking at the time they wrote it, and not put anything else into it. I find that appalling given that the majority of people who wrote the Constitution were slaveholders, and their goal was to create a document that somehow finessed the issue of servitude, and would allow slavery to exist in a society that was otherwise dedicated to liberty. Then there are a variety of other fundamentalists, including the Platonic fundamentalists who controlled our foreign policy in Bush's first term, the followers of Leo Strauss who have a bizarre notion that truth was revealed through the ancient classics and that careful study of those works will lead to enlightenment so that you can lead the masses. It's bizarre.

MJ: But certainly these varieties of fundamentalism don't comprise the whole of the Republican coalition?

DM: No, there are a bunch of self-interested actors too, what I call the crony capitalists who are basically making tons of money by transferring public wealth into private coffers: the most notorious of which include the infamous Carlisle Group, Halliburton, the private security firms in Iraq. These aren't people who believe in free markets, they believe in the private exploitation of public resources, and they'll do as much of it as they can get away with. And then are neo-confederates in the Republican Party who want to restore white power, and are not very subtle about it. You have the former Attorney General of the United States, John Ashcroft, giving interviews to Southern Partisan and lauding the accomplishments of Jefferson Davis. And then Trent Lott says that the principles of the Republican Party are the principles of Jefferson Davis. I mean, Abraham Lincoln must be rolling in his grave. Why do Democrats just let that pass? Why is any of this acceptable?

Indeed why do we let it pass? I have been hoping for someone to take the lead in the dems for some time now.