Still Crazy After All These Years

[dogday]

Tomorrow, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns is going to speak at the Brookings Institution on the subject of "Iran and U.S. National Security." I'll be there, and I'm hoping to get a chance to ask a question that's been weighing on my mind for the past several weeks:

Are you people out of your fucking minds?

Burns, obviously, works for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice, as you'll recall, is supposed to be the leader of the non-crazy, non-demented faction of the Bush administration. The counter-Cheney. The voice of reason. But she's also the one who provided Washington Post columnist David Ignatius last month with with "an unusually detailed public explanation of the new American effort to create a de facto alliance between Israel and moderate Arab states against Iranian extremism." As Rice told him,

After the war in Lebanon, the Middle East really did begin to clarify into an extremist element allied with Iran, including Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas. On the other side were the targets of this extremism -- the Lebanese, the Iraqis, the Palestinians -- and those who want to resist, such as the Saudis, Egypt, and Jordan.

Apparently, at some point American foreign policy descended from "seemingly deluded" to "explicitly deluded" and nobody took note. Ignatius, obviously prizing access over good sense, managed only to meekly note that "the realignment strategy poses as many question as it answers -- not least the anomaly of supporting Sunni resistance to Iran at the same time the U.S. augments its military support for a Shiite-led government in Iraq."

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12455

[oldtime dfl_er]

1. I'll sign off on that question too!

That question's been weighing on my mind for years!

[dogday]

2. I think they are truly messed up too........ nt