No doubt you’ve read or heard that over the weekend Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice was in the UK for a reciprocal meeting with British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw. It is also very likely, being the discriminating person
that you are, you read that Condi said "I know we have made tactical errors,
thousands of them I am sure." However, she believes "strongly" that the US made
the right "strategic" decision to take out the former regime (remember, Saddam
was not head of a ‘government’ but of a ‘regime’). Of course, she noted the ‘thousands’ was figurative and not literal. Afterall, if she was being literal and counting the mistakes, she’d have to list and explain them, something some Arab language press has picked up on.
But remember World, it is not what we do, but who we are that really
matters here.
- We do not condone or tolerate "either at home or abroad engagement
in acts of torture," as Condi said. - Despite Gitmo and Abu Gharib and
Saddam’s farm (prisoner ‘triage’), "have no desire to be the world’s jailer."
Each of these were followed by an exception, with a "but…" and how "our citizens
will judge us harshly", etc. Important to acknowledge here is WHAT she’s talking about: the Pentagon.
Curiously, at what point does Rice start really associating herself,
and more importantly her department, with the actions in and around Iraq? The mission of the State Department is, besides being over 2300 words (come on!), summarized by a one line, italicized statement at the top of the page:
Create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.
While building the largest Embassy in the world, Fortress Baghdad, with imported Southeast Asian labor crammed 12 – 14 to trailers that would otherwise house 3 – 4 Westerns, she clearly does not take the mission to heart.
Amendment Nine is spot on noting the escalating ‘debate’ between State and the Pentagon. Who owns the problem? Who owns the ‘thousands of tactical mistakes’? Who in the world ‘owns’ the Iraq project?
Returning to the interview on British TV1 with Jonathan Dimbley where Condi said ‘thousands of mistakes’, we jump in at her "clarification", followed by her failure to understand or discuss cause and effect:
SECRETARY RICE: Well, first of all, I guess it’s not possible to use a figure of speech rather than to be literal. I was being — giving a figure of speech when I talked about thousands.
But of course I’ve certainly made mistakes. You can’t make decisions without making mistakes.
QUESTION: But you don’t link — excuse me. You don’t link those mistakes that you’ve made in any degree to the suffering today, the killing today, in Iraq? You don’t think if you’d done it differently we might be spared that today?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, you know, history will tell because you can never tell — and I’m enough of an historian to know that things that looked like a brilliant strategy in the immediate period later looked like terribly mistaken or in fact really mistaken strategies.
QUESTION: Well, we’re getting the –
SECRETARY RICE: And ones that at the time looked like mistakes later turned out to have been exactly the right thing to do. So I’ll let history judge those things.
But I want to make a very clear point. The terrorists are the ones who are keeping the Iraqis from — who are trying to keep Iraqis from fully realizing their potential. They are the ones who talk about civil war between Iraqis, even though the Iraqis themselves talk about governments of national unity or visiting each other’s mosques.
QUESTION: But it’s clearly — it’s not only those people who talk about civil war. We have senior Iraqis talking about civil war. Indeed, we have the American Ambassador to Iraq saying that Iraq — now I’m quoting exactly — is really vulnerable to civil war. Do you accept what he says?
SECRETARY RICE: Of course it’s vulnerable when you have people like Zarqawi trying to stimulate civil war and trying to foment civil war. Of course it’s vulnerable when it’s had years of sectarian tension, where people settled their differences by — just give me a moment. Where people settled their differences either by violence or by repression and are now trying to do that by politics and by compromise.
But we have to look at the alternative, and the alternative is that these people would continue to live in the captivity of a tyrant, that Saddam Hussein would continue to threaten his neighbors and his own people. That period is over and the Iraqis are now on a course, the very difficult course, toward a more democratic future. And that’s something that we should celebrate. Difficult as it is, it is better than the alternative.
QUESTION: Was it a tactical error or a strategic error to disband the army, to disband the police, to take a huge number of Baathist civil servants out of their roles of administration, which many people say was a major contributory factor to the prospect of or the vulnerability to civil war today?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, when this history is written, one of the things –
QUESTION: What’s your view now?
SECRETARY RICE: When this –
QUESTION: What’s your view now?
SECRETARY RICE: No, when this history is written, one of the things that will be clear is that the Iraqi army, in a sense, melted away and we were faced with no structures of the army. And I’d ask you: Should we instead or should the Iraqis instead, who after all helped to set the de-Baathification procedures, simply have ignored the many, many people who were oppressed by the Baath Party? So yes, there may been some excesses in de-Baathification. Iraqis now admit that. There are efforts to correct that.
But on the other hand, it is also true that the Baath Party and the leadership of the Baath Party under Saddam Hussein committed hundreds and thousands of atrocities, and that also had to be dealt with.
There is no need to point fingers when subtle waves of the hand does just as well. Starting with ‘tactical mistakes’, Condi ends up attempts to brush it over and move on. Rummy, are more unknown unknowns becoming known by now?