She Just Won't Go Away

In a column in the neo-conservative opinion page of The Washington Post, former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice grudgingly concedes

Diplomatic isolation, asset freezes and travel bans against oligarchs are appropriate. The announcement of air defense exercises with the Baltic states and the movement of a U.S. destroyer to the Black Sea bolster our allies, as does economic help for Ukraine’s embattled leaders, who must put aside their internal divisions and govern their country.

From there, she goes on to be unceasingly critical, claiming even

But even those modest steps did not hold. Despite Russia’s continued occupation ofAbkhazia and South Ossetia, the diplomatic isolation waned and then the Obama administration’s “reset” led to an abrupt revision of plans to deploy missile defense components in the Czech Republic and Poland. Talk of Ukraine and Georgia’s future in NATO ceased. Moscow cheered.

I will be making an appointment with an audiologist; you should, too, if you did not hear "Moscow cheer."  In 2008, Rice's boss, President George W. Bush, did in fact advocate admitting Ukraine and Georgia into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as have many experts. It has been opposed by Germany and France, though they're evidently "old Europe."

It takes a special kind of arrogance for a Bush 43 foreign policy adviser to charge, in 2014, "Most important, the United States must restore its standing in the international community, which has been eroded by too many extended hands of friendship to our adversaries, sometimes at the expense of our friends." It has not been quite seven years since Brent W. Scowcroft, national security adviser for President George H.W. Bush, told the National Journal

This Bush administration assumed that power is always resented anyway, so they would just use it unilaterally and people would forgive the United States as long as we succeeded. That just runs contrary to human nature...

That the international community no longer trusts our motives is a new phenomenon, and I see it as one of many warning signs of a possible lasting realignment of global power...

This is the Bush administration Rice so loyally served and still refuses to question.  And it was while serving as Secretary of State for Bush 43 that the woman affectionately known as "Condi" took to the CNN airwaves (video of statement here; CNN article by Wolf Blitzer here) to manipulate public opinion with "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."





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Rice's primary argument for the invasion of Iraq, before and after one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in American history, has been the "threat" posed by Saddam Hussein.     But maybe from the standpoint of the Administration it was not a blunder.  We pick up Rachel Maddow's groundbreaking report from late 2002/early 2003:

Back in the U.S., the Bush administration is also denying a "Wall Street Journal" report that administration officials held meetings about the war with oil industry executives. But British documents now reveal that in the fall of 2002, ahead of the invasion, BP`s Middle East director held a week of meetings with officials from both the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon, including with Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld`s second in command.

At the Pentagon with just two months until the invasion, attention turns to who will run Iraq in the immediate days and weeks after the fall of Saddam. Retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, a man with deep experience in the region, gets the call from Donald Rumsfeld.

LT. GEN. JAY GARNER, U.S. ARMY (RET): He said, we need right now is somebody to come in, put a staff together, operationalize the plans we put together. You know, you think if you`re going to put that together you`d have office space and desk and computers and telephones and all that. I didn`t even have a chair.

MADDOW: That lack of planning when it comes to basic post-Saddam governance stands in stark contrast to the level of planning that`s already well under way for Iraq`s oil sector.

(then-Defense Department adviser Gary) VOGLER: There was a very strong sense of urgency. It was 12, 15- hour days from what I remember. They knew where every pipeline, where every refinery, gas plant, oil field, gas oil separation plant was.People said we didn`t plan very well for Iraq. I would take exception to that when it came to the oil sector.

(U.S. Representative Henry) WAXMAN: We are spending more time thinking about how to deal with the oil fields in Iraq than we were about our own troops when we went to war in Iraq.

BUSH: All Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people.

MADDOW: As the invasion of Iraq gets under way, months` worth of detailed planning aimed at securing Iraq`s oil resources gets put into action.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade who are guarding key facilities in the oil fields right now. Because we know we want to get the oil flowing as soon as possible.
GARNER: I remember several times the statement that we want to make sure that we don`t give an optic that makes the American people we`re going in there for oil -- we`re not doing that. I mean, that was -- I knew that from day one.

MADDOW: Despite that stated goal, as the U.S. military arrives in Baghdad, with heavy looting under way, Marines protect Iraq`s oil ministry, to the exclusion of other critical Iraqi government buildings and institutions.

(chief of staff to Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence) WILKERSON: We let the museums go. We let the art and culture go. We let the telephones go elsewhere. We let the administrative office go, ministry of the interior, ministry of justice. We let all those things go and we protected the oil ministry.

MADDOW: The perception that the U.S. has launched a war for oil is further stoked when the U.S. Army`s 101st Airborne Division crosses the border into Iraq and establishes two refueling stations in the Iraqi desert. The Army names the two desert outposts after Exxon and Shell, unbeknownst to the companies, themselves.

Maddow, with the help of her staff, demonstrated that the USA government invaded Iraq to increase the world supply of oil. "Condi" Rice is still walking around a free person, still maintaining the war was fought because of some threat from Saddam Hussein. She gets to propagandize freely, apparently because there is a constitutional right to editorialize in The Washington Post. And she is welcomed to deliver a paid commencement speech at a major university, whose president (Chris Christie's guy) is once again demonstrating his complete lack of integrity.

It's a great country, but one in which there are over 4,000 dead soldiers in part because of "Condi" Rice.


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