22 August 2003

Albright says president's policies divide U.S. from Arab moderates, CNN.com, Friday, August 22, 2003 Posted: 12:47 AM EDT This Republican administration, and modern Repbublican political philosophy in general, should be roundly discredited at this point in time. Dubya's administration could not even pull-off its central foreign policy objective, i.e. regime removal in Iraq, effectively. The diplomatic preparation for war was a failure. It was, in effect, a logical extension of an already failed foreign policy which managed to squander even the best wishes of allies after the dramatic terrorist assault on 9/11. The neocon approach is philosophically flawed, strategically flawed, and now doggedly insists on a failed tactics involving an inadequate force that was based on erroneous assumptions about the tenacity of the threat and the attitude of the Iraqi people. Never have so few been so wrong for so long, without challenge, to the detriment of so many. I recall Albright, in the face of systematic genocide taking place in the heart of europe,  practically begging for military intervention in the Balkans. I recall her asking what the point is in maintaining a standing military if you are never willing to use it? Now she sees a military intervention done all wrong, for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time, that jeopardizes American security, writ big. "Albright, writing in the current issue of Foreign Affairs quarterly, criticized Bush for, as she put it, using "the shock of force" rather than relying on alliances in ways that fundamentally depart from more than a half-century of U.S. foreign policy." "Albright, a Democrat who headed the State Department in the Clinton administration, said Bush was rejecting the advice even of his father, former President George H.W. Bush, that the United States should not go it alone in the fight against terrorism "or in anything else, for that matter." "She quoted the current president as declaring before going to war with Iraq that "at some point we may be the only ones left. That's OK with me. We are America." "Albright, talking on NBC's "Today," accused the Bush administration of making the terrorism situation even worse in the Middle East by invading Iraq." "I do think that what has happened is that whereas the link with al Qaeda was very tenuous at best when proposed by the Bush administration, now in fact Iraq is going to become a breeding ground for terrorism or a gathering ground as Afghanistan has," she said Thursday." "Instead of asking them to oppose al Qaeda, Bush also asked for support for the invasion of an Arab country and endorsement of the doctrine of pre-emption, all in one package, she wrote." "Even more remarkable than Arab leaders deciding they did not want to be with the United States even though they opposed al Qaeda, she said, was the reaction among the closest U.S. friends in Europe." "Albright wrote that Washington initiated the war "in a show of dominance prompted by a sense of vulnerability that most Europeans do not fully share." "If former Vice President Al Gore had won the presidency in 2000, Albright said his administration would have concluded "that a war against Iraq, while justifiable, was not essential in the short-term to protect U.S. security." "By invading Iraq before securing Afghanistan, the situation in both countries is deteriorating, she said." "We switched wars, frankly," she told NBC. "We should have been concentrating more on Afghanistan, and we did do a war of choice in terms of time in Iraq." 9:37:23 PM    comment [] trackback []

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