Condoleezza Rice Is All Wrong on Ukraine Crisis
By Contributor
Progressive.org, April 16, 2014
By Clarence Lusane
EXCERPT...
Obama has been right to try not to turn the crisis in Ukraine into a military confrontation with Russia.
But Rice, who is the director of the Global Center for Business and the Economy at Stanford University, keeps egging the administration on.
Speaking to the California Republican Party in March, she said, “America has to lead.” She acknowledged that the American people “are tired . . . after more than 10 years of war and terrorism and engagement abroad.”
But Rice and the other leaders of the Bush administration are the ones who are responsible for getting us tired of war and terrorism and military engagements abroad.
As National Security Adviser, she was the main person responsible in the period leading up to September 11 for identifying and responding to terrorist threats. She ignored warnings that an Al Qaeda attack was coming, most infamously on August 6, 2001, in the Presidential Daily Brief titled, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” which Rice and Bush ignored.
Rice was also one of the chief propagandists for the disastrous war against Iraq. She was the one who first used the phrase that “the smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud.” And she insisted in an op-ed for the New York Times in January 2003 that Saddam Hussein was lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, it was Rice and Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who weren’t telling the American people the truth about these weapons. The Iraq War, which they launched on a false pretense, ended up costing almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers their lives. It also killed between 100,000 and one million Iraqis, and drained the U.S. Treasury of more than a trillion dollars.
Rice and her neoconservative colleagues in the Bush administration are in no position to be criticizing Obama’s handling of the crisis in Ukraine.
That they are taken seriously is the only surprise, since they never have apologized for, or even acknowledged, the fundamentally wrong and misleading role they played when they were in power.
Disregarding the disaster they created in Iraq, they once again seek to brandish the military might of the United States to send the message that Washington is still the big dog on the world stage.
“Leaders can’t afford to get tired,” she said last month. “Leaders can’t afford to be weary.”
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http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/04/187640/condoleezza-rice-all-wrong-ukraine-crisis
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