The Lady Has Quit Learning Anything New

I have several gripes with the current administration.

The war is not one of them: Lincoln’s Lessons with his incompetent generals taught us that it takes a long time to get each new kind of war right. And each war is different from the last one. The problem with the one in the Middle East is that the peace wing of the Democrats - who were also out in force during the Civil War - are too impatient to allow for a learning curve.

And Bush has vetoed some creepy legislation sent to him from the Imperial Congress. For that I am grateful, though he has unfortunately turned out to be a Bloated Government Republican.

However, my deepest concern is how he allows himself to be perceived vis-à-vis the immoderate Muslims in this country, and the alignments he makes with Saudi-funded propagandists.

In this vein, his Secretary of State is right on the same page with him, and they are both so wrong that it boggles the mind. Here’s Mr. Fitzgerald's view from Dhimmi Watch:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice does not understand Islam. At this point she apparently still must watch football games (we are always told that she is a fan of football -- it’s designed to soften, to popularize, her image, one presumes), or practice the piano, or do those other things that the “multi-talented” “scholar of Russia” who “knows Russian” does. In fact, her Russian is halting, as her one disastrous attempt to conduct an interview in Russian proved to Russian television viewers. Her specialty was not “Russia” but the Russian military. That made her, just like Paul Wolfowitz, someone untrained in, and unaware of, the influence of history, of culture, of their own particular culture and history, on people who, strange to say, do not all want to become little Americans and wouldn’t know how to do so if one presented them with the possibility.

She has been foolish on Iraq, suggesting that the Sunnis and Shi’a will just have to “get over it” because --

- - - - - - - - -

-- well, because that is the only way the Bush Administration’s grand plans for Iraq could ever conceivably be successful. But Sunnis and Shi’a will not “get over it.” And what’s more, the Muslim Arabs will not “get over it” when it comes to their absolute refusal to consider Israel as a permanent presence. An Infidel nation-state in the middle of Dar al-Islam? Impossible. If there is a chance to destroy Israel militarily, it will be acted on. And the likelihood of the Muslim Arabs thinking that such a chance will arise again will be much greater if that so-called “Palestinian” state comes into being, with all the control over invasion routes and West Bank aquifers. Why not just cause a famine in Israel by polluting or destroying or diverting those aquifers?

[…]

…In reality, the “best deal” for Israel is never again to be suckered into, pressured into, any conceivable “deal” with Muslims who are firmly fixed on the basic principle of Muslim treaty-making with Infidel states, the principle that such treaties are to be broken, and such breaking of them is not merely allowed but encouraged by the example of Muhammad in the first Muslim “peace treaty” -- that of 628 A.D., which he made with the Meccans at Al-Hudaibiyyah. That treaty stands for all time as the model of Muslim treaty-making with Infidels, including those who now live and attempt to stay alive in the Infidel nation-state of Israel.

Does Rice know this? Of course not. She has never read, and not a single person who advises her has read, the texts of Islam on such treaty-making.

But she doesn’t have time. And besides, it would raise so many disturbing questions. It would imply that all that effort, over so many years, by assorted dennis-rosses and richard-haasses and henry-kissingers and bill-clintons and william-rogers and tutti quanti, to use shuttle diplomacy, and negotiations, and handshakes on the g-ddam lawn, and smiles for the photographers, has been fruitless. And it has. All of it has ended, always, with some kind of further Israeli concession, and a further legitimizing, before the world’s public, of the Arab Muslim Jihad.

[…]

She’s not able to learn beyond what she learned long ago. She seems intelligent by comparison with her boss. She’s elegantly turned out. She’s self-assured, because people defer to her, and those who don’t defer to her are usually unwilling to demonstrate that they find her pretensions ridiculous. However, the nuclear-arms expert, David Kay, who had many dealings with her, described her as the “worst national security adviser” in the history of the country. And given that among the rivals for that crown are Brzezinski and Scowcroft, that is saying something.

As always, the comments section at Dhimmi Watch is worth reading. Especially in this post. One person calls her a pretty, empty suit.

It is sad to lose confidence in someone you once admired. In this case, I realize I was sold a bill of goods. Sometimes one has to wait and see how a person lives up to - or fails to - their press releases. In this case, the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is a huge chasm.

Whatever transpires in the next presidential election, at least we will be free of Secretary Rice’s huge failure to understand the diplomatic necessities for fighting the war that has been declared and waged on us. In any other century, she would have been accused of conspiring with the enemy.

Mr. Fitzgerald nails her fatal flaw: “She’s not able to learn beyond what she learned long ago.”

When you realize she spent her career in academia and government, how could she have turned out any differently. They live in bubble, those people. And it is an indestructible force field around them…

I can’t believe it’s come to this point but I am actually wishing Colin Powell were back in the cat bird seat.