Taylor Marsh – TaylorMarsh.com – News, Opinion and Weblog on Progressive Politics

Condi looks great, but what good is she? I'll get to that in a minute.

Under George W. Bush and the Republican Congress, we have lost our honest
broker status in the Middle East. This is important, which we've been discussing for days and days. Ian just emailed me a surreal photo that accompanies the speed up the bombing delivery, Israeli style, this morning.

I also got into a discussion about what's different about us rushing the “bunker busters” to Israel. Here's the deal. We sold Israel a bunch of munitions last year, including the bunker buster. However, Israel still had to make the schedule for delivery. But someone screwed up and they didn't. So now that Israel is in the middle of a war they needed the munitions, especially the GBU-28, which is the 5,000 pound laser-guided bomb that kicks ass. So what did Bush do? He altered U.S. policy to rush the munitions to Israel. As someone else I was talking with wrote, this puts us even more directly involved with arming Israel in a middle of a situation that could make matters worse for America. I would add that it will kill us in Iraq, literally.

What we have lost under George W. Bush and the Republicans will take years
to recover. If only history was the guide.

… In August 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon. That time they were trying to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization. This time it's Hezbollah. During 14 hours on Aug. 12, the Israelis flew 220 bombing sorties over Beirut and fired 44,000 artillery shells into the city. Americans, perhaps more innocent in those days, were horrified by what they saw on television. A Newsweek correspondent cabled home: “Watching the Israeli Air Force smashing Beirut to pieces was like having to watch a man slowly beating a sick dog to death.” The next morning, one of Reagan's longtime assistants, Michael Deaver, came into the Oval Office and told Reagan he was quitting: “I can't be part of this anymore, the bombings, the killing of children. It's wrong. You're the one person on the face of the Earth right now who can stop it. All you have to do is tell Begin you want it stopped.” Accounts of the incident differ slightly — former Secretary of State George Shultz told me he felt Deaver exaggerated his own role — but there is no disagreement about what happened that afternoon. Reagan called Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Working from notes, as usual, the American president said the future of relations between the two allies would be affected if the bombing and shelling were not stopped. Reagan used, deliberately, the word “Holocaust” to describe what Israel was doing. Begin, who never had a good personal relationship with Reagan, was enraged, saying Israel was a sovereign country, not an American colony. Twenty minutes later, he called back the White House and said he was ordering an end to the attack on Beirut. “Shalom, Menachem,” said Reagan as he hung up. He turned to Deaver and said, “I didn't know I had that kind of power.” ONLY BUSH HAS THE POWER TO STOP THE KILLING, by Richard Reeves

Instead, what Bush is doing, with the cheerful backing of the Republican Party, is speeding
up bomb delivery to Israel, while Condi refuses to talk to anyone on the other
side. Egypt's Mubarak told her to go take a flying leap.

Maureen
Dowd (free link via) takes out after Condi the Incompetent and nails the inept fashion diva
to the mannequin rack, drawing out her “camel-colored suit with an athletic white stripe” image. If only Condi cared as much about her competency as she did about her outfit. But that's a Republican for you: image before substance every time. Shuttle diplomacy, Dowd calls it. More like light switch
diplomacy, if you ask me. Here's Dowd:

… Condi doesn’t want to talk to Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran — “Syria knows what it needs to do,” she says with asperity — and she doesn’t want a cease-fire. She wants “a sustainable cease-fire,” which means she wants to give the Israelis more time to decimate Hezbollah bunkers with the precision-guided bombs that the Bush administration is racing to deliver. “I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do,” she said. Keep more civilians from being killed? Or at least keep America from being even more despised in the Middle East and around the globe? Like Davy Jones, the octopus-headed creature who had to keep sailing Flying Dutchman-like without getting to land in the new “Pirates of the Caribbean,” Condi had a hard time finding an Arab port in which to dock. The Arab street, declared prematurely dead by the neocons after the Iraq invasion, is so incensed over scenes of mass graves, homeless children and Israeli ground incursions into Lebanon that Egypt spurned Ms. Rice’s bid to meet next week in Cairo. (Her only consolation is that at least the autocratic Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, is listening to the Arab street as she has been harping on him to do for more than a year.) The Arab allies, who agreed to meet her and European envoys in Rome, clearly did not want to be used as a stalling tactic on Arab turf, with Condi miming diplomacy to buy time for Israel. Maybe, like Jack Sparrow, they can at least bring a jar of Arab turf with them. … (snip) Having inadvertently built up Iran with his failures in Iraq, W. is eager now to send Iran a shock-and-awe message through Israel. … Condi’s Flying Dutchman

And the dead just keep on coming. I wonder if Condi will wear black in Rome?