Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Preemption is not a pillar, it’s a means


Condi Rice gave a somewhat testy interview to Die Zeit. She took issue with the interviewer calling pre-emption one of the pillars of Bush’s foreign policy:
RICE: Well, first of all, preemption is not a pillar; it’s a means. It is --

Q: It’s a national security strategy.

RICE: It’s a national security means.
So that’s okay then.

She said that the reason so many Coalition of the Willing (COW) countries are pulling their troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq is that “many of [them] did not invest in their defense capacity for a long time.”

Somebody’s been hanging around Chimpy too long: “It’s as a component of peace, but also as a component of a moral responsibility of not to leave anybody living in tyranny if you can avoid it.”

She still claims that Hamas winning the Palestinian elections was a win for our side: “But you have a democratic government and a presidency that is the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people and you have Hamas unable to deliver and therefore stripped of some of the -- stripped of some of the romance of the resistance without responsibility.” So the Israeli blockade of Gaza = Hamas “unable” to deliver.

On Russian pressure against Star Wars being sited in Poland and the Czech Republic: “You know, when -- before Russia tells us what they think of a proposal, they go to the press. ... It’s pretty transparent. And so I think that -- I hope that they’ll reconsider their ways.” Elsewhere in the interview, she talked about Russia’s turn away from democratic values, but when it comes to diplomacy, here she is complaining about Russia being transparent and telling them to stop it.

Since I have been begged not to show any more scary pictures of Condi, I will illustrate this post instead with a charming picture of a chimp and his dog.


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