Condoleezza - On The Wrong Side

Congress has voted to cut U.S. funding to the U.N. This despite the fact that that the U.N. is trying to clean up its act or that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recommended all the housecleaning that Congress is now insisting upon. (Or that we created the U.N. after WWII for peacekeeping.)

Since Annan took the initiative, I suspect that this Administration is afraid Annan might succeed in cleaning up the U.N so it becomes the respected institution that it was created to be and can actually can tell the U.S. it can’t invade other countries with impunity. That's probably why this Administration was calling for Annan to resign a while ago.

But Bush et al need not worry if Bolton gets a seat at the U.N. The obstructive and argumentative ambassador - coupled with Congress’ latest good will to the world gesture of withdrawing U.S. funding - is sure to make the U.N. more ineffective than ever in solving the world's chronic problems of starvation and lacks in medical care, education, sustainable development and human rights.

Let them eat cake.

But I digress.

While Rice is hypocritical in recommending an ineffective bureaucrat to the U.N. when even she, as Secretary of State, could no longer tolerate his obstructionist attitudes, she has displayed a new burst of hypocrisy regarding "liberty."

Yesterday, while in Riyadh, Rice lectured the Saudi Arabian government on the benefits of establishing liberty even as she participates in the most repressive and anti-liberty U.S. Administration since Richard Nixon’s.

Get this: according to yesterday’s St. Petersburg Times, Rice told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that she was “concerned” because of violence visited on “peaceful supporters of democracy.”

Whose? Ours or theirs?

Because she should be concerned about ours.

Our own “peaceful supporters of democracy” – many of whom were seniors – had a strong taste of oppression during protests against FTAA in November of 2003 when Miami police got the word to get the protestors off the streets.

The protests were attended by average Americans. People who attended came back and told stories about being aggressively harassed by police, blocked from getting to the protest site, reporters being ordered to shut off their cameras, posters announcing the protests torn down and a "police attack" on innocent people as dissent was stifled.

In a group of 15,000 protestors, about 12 started throwing rocks. That led to over 250 people - most of them innocent of any wrong doing - being pepper sprayed, beaten and arrested.

Virtually all the arrests were found to be unwarranted.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said: "It is clear that the protesters' basic right to have their voices heard was severely restricted, and that all Americans' civil liberties took a one-two punch in Miami."

Amnesty International issued a statement saying: "The level of force used by police does not appear to have been at all justified."

There were reports that at least 10 detainees were beaten in jail and Amnesty International had received four reports of sexual assault while in custody.

Did Rice ever address these abuses in the good ole US of A?

No. She wouldn't be Secretary of State now if she had.

Tragically for this country it's not liberty she cares about, but her career. And her career hinges on her parroting what the Bush Administration wants: finding strategies by which it can exert complete American political dominance over the rest of the world.

Gee, there was another country once that wanted to dominate the world and invade “as needed,” wasn’t there?

Of concern – and this should be of concern to all Americans – yesterday Rice declared “that the United States was no longer willing to accept regional stability at the expense of political freedom.”

Think about that.

No longer willing to accept regional stability…

What? As in how we were no longer willing to accept regional stability in Iraq?

Call Hussein a monster – he was – but the region was stable. Iraqis were not being blown up in restaurants as they were trying to grab a quick lunch. 100,000 more of them were alive before we invaded than are alive now. And how many were killed just in the last 4 days? 71? And how many wounded?

There used to be a police force that actually could keep people from being murdered on the streets. There were jobs. There was electricity, water, housing. And the beautiful and ancient city of Baghdad was not a cesspool of ruin.

Incredibly, I think Rice is saying that the United States is willing to invade any place, any time under the guise of “promoting liberty” even if we create the same chaos - the same regional instability - that we created in Iraq.

No wonder Iran wants nuclear weapons. Iran sees that Rice isn’t standing in Korea and making such announcements. The last thing Iran wants is a decimated society and destroyed infrastructure.

And please don’t insult your own intelligence by telling me Iraqis are any more free now than they were under Saddam. They are just under a different –and nightmarish – brand of tyranny in which occupation co-exists with chaos and – despite all the troops – neither order nor safety is maintained.

As Harold Meyerson writes in The Washington Post today: "More than two years after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled, the drive from downtown Baghdad to the airport is still a crapshoot with death."

If you think this is just "liberal" propaganda from a patently conservative publication, then do me a favor. Take a vacation and go to Iraq. See for yourself. If I’m full of %$ I will close down this blog and join the Republican party.

But if you find that all the happy news you’ve heard – about how well things are going in Iraq – is a tissue of lies, you better come clean – if you make it home alive.

Any way I look at this incredibly well-educated and talented woman, I come to one sad conclusion: Rice is a hypocrite selling flawed ideology – and lies – for the sake of advancement of her own career.

The real tragedy is she appears to believe them. If she didn't, she would be such an asset on the side of real ideals.

I would like to believe she has a master plan: be a black woman who attains great power and then use it for good.

But I grow tired of seeing her on the wrong side.