Update:
The New Republic published a column by Leon Wieseltier that, in its attacks on Obama’s Ukraine policy specifically and his foreign policy in general, is similar to Condoleezza Rice’s column discussed below.
Jim Sleeper, at the Washington Monthly Magazine, reacts to Wieseltier’s remarks in a unique and effective way: “Leon Wieseltier’s Moral Posturing on Crimea Suggests He Learned Nothing From his Moral Posturing on Iraq”
A must read, here.
Jim Sleeper is a lecturer at Yale and he teaches a seminar on global journalism and national identities.
Leon Wieseltier is literary editor of The New Republic.
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Original post:
Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, has joined the Krauthammers, the McCains, the Grahams and a host of other critics in their unrelenting, vile attacks on the President of the United States at a time when the United States and its allies are doing everything in their power — short of war — to contain the naked Russian aggression in Ukraine.
In a Washington Post opinion piece, Rice — who was part of an administration that was asleep at the wheel when Russia invaded Georgia and went on to swallow-up South Ossetia and Abkhazia under her and Bush’s watch — wants to tell president Obama “how it’s done” and asks whether America “will heed the wake-up call of Ukraine.”
Rice shares that Putin, in late 2004, in his cozy dacha wanted her to get the point that “Ukraine is [Russia’s] — and don’t forget it.” One has to wonder what the woman who had already stood solidly behind the invasion of sovereign Iraq had to say to Putin about that — one wonders even more what Rice did about that perceived threat during the next four years of the Bush administration.
As it turned out, Rice and Bush, would not have to deal with Putin’s Ukraine promise. Putin, instead of going after Ukraine, fooled Rice and Bush and invaded Georgia in 2008. An act of stark aggression that Rice glosses over with boasts of having sent ships into the Black Sea, having airlifted Georgian military forces from Iraq back to their home bases (Alas, there are no Ukrainian military to be airlifted back from a U.S.-occupied nation this time) and of having sent humanitarian aid. Steps which Rice, to her credit admits, “did not hold,” as Russia to this day continues to occupy Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
But then, Rice obliquely attempts to blame the continued occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and “Georgia’s future in NATO” on the Obama administration’s “reset,” etc., rather than acknowledging the Bush administration’s part in this fiasco in the first place.
Rice, again to her credit, does acknowledge…
Diplomatic isolation, asset freezes and travel bans against oligarchs are appropriate. The announcement of air defense exercises with the Baltic states and the movement of a U.S. destroyer to the Black Sea bolster our allies, as does economic help for Ukraine’s embattled leaders, who must put aside their internal divisions and govern their country.
Rice mentions some other good measures to answer “Putin’s statement about Europe’s post-Cold War future” in the longer term.
Regrettably, Rice then reverts to what she and the other neocons do best: rewriting history.
Rice says that the United States most important task is to “restore its standing in the international community” and trots out the by-now predicable stable that includes such horses as Syria, Iran, declining defense budgets, even “talk of withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
For some strange reason Rice does not trot out the currently a-la-mode Benghazi show horse, but curiously she brings out from retirement her favorite: the Iraq war horse. Even more perplexing, instead of admitting that the Iraq War — the gratuitous invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation — is exactly what lost or damaged our high “standing in the international community” and our prestige, and our credibility and, our respect and, most of all, our moral authority, Rice unabashedly and with great élan claims that America’s failure was not the act of invading and occupying that country under false pretenses, but rather that we failed by not staying in Iraq, presumably for another one hundred years as McCain once suggested. “We must not fail, as we did in Iraq, to leave behind a residual presence. Anything less than the American military’s requirement for 10,000 troops will say that we are not serious about helping to stabilize that country,” Rice says as part of heeding “the wake-up call of Ukraine. “
No one can predict what will happen in Crimea and in Ukraine, but one thing that is as certain as sunrise tomorrow is that the Krauthammers and the McCains and the Grahams and the Rices have already loaded their quivers with multi-purpose, vilify-Obama arrows, regardless of the outcome.
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