That limited talks between the U.S. and Iran - what diplomospeak would term "fledgling dialogue" - have occurred intermittently in the past few years amid war in the region and mutual animosity between the two nations is an indication of the possibility of some accord someday... but obviously not until the neoconservative presence in the White House and Pentagon isn't so pervasive.

Condoleeza Rice's smack talk this week, if anything, underscores the shabbiness of White House tactics - relentlessly setting the bar for Iranian engagement so high that stalemate is guaranteed. This seedy sabotage isn't fooling that many Americans these days; the promise to take preconditions off the table and negotiate in good faith is one plank of Obama's platform most attractive to voters.

I wonder just how history will remember Rice: As an ever-compliant gofer for Bush and his policy hounds, or as a kind of imperial-age Claudius, keeping her head down and her finger in the dike of yearning catastrophe. She hasn't been tagged with the big disasters of Bush's reign - not because she let Bremer, Tennant and Rumsfeld take any falls in her stead - but because the bad decisions cannot be laid at her door. Rumsfeld and the rest were the prime actors in this tragic farce - not Rice. She can be blamed for apparent negligence - for not taking a stronger hand in the proceedings and countering their demented schemes. But the accent here is on apparent; we simply don't know what she did or didn't do behind the scenes, and McClellan doesn't seem to have been close enough to the table to grasp all the interplay.

Could it be that our global standing and strategic position might be even worse - if Condi wasn't around?

McClennan has also said, in interviews, that we should take what this administration says very seriously -- specifically with respect to Iran and a possible conflict there before the end of Bush's term.

That's why I am very concerned with Rice's rhetoric here: "...they continue to inch toward nuclear weapons under the cover of talks." Her next sentence might as well have been, "We don't want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud".

These people still have 7+ months in office. They also believe they're right and they're the good guys. They also think they can influence the election, and that war is good for their side in that context.

We need to pay attention to this. We need to be vigilant, and not let ourselves be distracted by the election coverage, etc.

Can we talk about impeachment yet??

-- ARG

Let's not forget her performance (or lack thereof) leading up to 9/11.

Hillary is apparently making the same arguments at th AIPAC meeting right now. Way to support the nominee Senator Clinton! The Republican nominee.

"The real question is why won't Iran talk to us.

Perhaps they're having a hard time seeing the difference between the antics of the characters in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest and the antics of the Bu$h administration.

At the end of the movie the main character McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, gets a lobotomy.

She's just trying to help her husb- er - boss achieve his wishes.

I wonder what Hillary would say about Secretary Rice's effectiveness, if asked directly about it.

Sorry. Above reference is to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest" posted by Tahut.

"As far as I'm concerned, both Rice and Powell were in the torture meeting, and after that it's simply not possible for me to think of them as good guys who were trying to push the administration in a more reasonable direction."

BEFORE that -- in fact back in 1968 -- Powell was the first to investigate -- and cover up -- the My Lai massacre.

That's who Powell has been all along. And he really topped himself when he lied to the
UN and the world, thus knowingly threw his own troops' lives away for what he knew was a lie and disaster-in-the-making.

All that training at Stanford in those cutthroat faculty meetings has paid off beaucoup for Condi.

soupson52

If the main character, McMurphy, is the American public, does that means we'll all get lobotimized at the end of Bu$h's term?

She's like a lot of successful "leaders" at the top rungs of power: incredibly deft at dodging blame for abject failure.

I just hope Stanford doesn't take her back and that she's as unemployable as Abu Al Gonzales.

As Richard Clarke said, she was the worst National Security Advisor in the history of the job . . .

"Bin Laden determined to attack the U.S." should be on her gravestone.

You guys need to stop picking on Condi. She's a strong black woman. She's above our carping. She will stand by her man.

What amazes me, honestly, is that none of these fine, upstanding people we have running the country have decided to just nuke Iraq into a glowing parking lot yet. It just doesn't seem in character to me that someone like Dubya, or Condi, or Cheney, is willing to walk away with Iraq still in the lose column, knowing that history is going to record the entire debacle as a terrible defeat for America, and largely lay the blame on the Bush Administration. Not if all they have to do is authorize a few warhead launches to turn it all around, anyway.

No, seriously. Why wouldn't they? Concern for human life, or America's international reputation, or the impact it would have on any future attempts at negotiation and/or diplomacy with virtually any nation-state anywhere?

What, are you serious?

The one I remember best was from her confirmation hearings as Secretary of State when she told Sen. Boxer "You can't question my integrity because I can't remember where I put it." [Well, that's not exactly what she actually said, but it's a pretty good translation.]

Nothing very new about this. A lengthy New Yorker profile pointed out 5 or 6 years ago that she was fitting her National Security Adviser responsibilities in among toadying to George Bush in the Oval Office and toadying to Mrs George Bush in the presidential accommodations upstairs.

The CIA by the end of 2001 was leaking its complaints that she wasn't reading the briefing documents they sent her daily, and during later Senate confirmation hearings she denied that the CIA had warned her in August 2001 of something very like what occurred on 9/11. Right there on camera, she had the CIA memorandum laid before her at the Senate witness table and was forced to agree that oh yes indeed, it HAD warned her of the al-Qaeda intention.

Having proved she was incompetent, the Republican-dominated Senate promptly confirmed her appointment. It was what Bush wanted.

Dr Rice's fading academic expertise is in dealing with a former nation called the USSR, during a former competition known as the Cold War. It's become obvious in recent years that her conduct as NSA was designed to keep controversies away from the president -- which is certainly not what good NSAs do -- and obvious in recent months that her trips to the Middle East in particular arouse little more than contempt from the Arab states she visits. Veiled contempt, to be sure.

No wonder she Talks Big to Israel-supporting groups, which make boffo audiences.

Her remarks to AIPAC this week sit ill with the public pleas uttered by the Iranian leader Ahmedinajad, trying to establish talks with Washington, and more particularly, with Bush. This is how Ahmedinajad shows he won't talk to Washington? Baffling.

>friendly snipfriendly snip

To DocNebula inre nuking Iraq (or Iran):

They won't do it because they wouldn't be able to get the oil. The radiation levels from that type of attack would significantly impede the ability to extract the oil. Not to mention the possibility that the oil fields could possibly ignite underground with that type of attack.