What is secretary Rice telling us about Iran ? - -
By Michael Ledeen
October 2, 2006
Cognitive Dissonance The Bush administration on Iran.
By Michael Ledeen
She’s a Renaissance woman, whose talents run from scholarship to music and sport. But in this interview Condoleezza Rice often seems oddly detached from the life-and-death quality of the war against the terror masters. Indeed, she doesn’t even call it a war, and the things she says about it are sometimes striking — headline quality remarks — but more often very peculiar. To begin with, she doesn’t expect us to win this “battle, if you will, or a struggle,” during the Bush presidency. Her mission for the next two years is not victory, but to put “some fundamentals in place.” I wish the interviewer had asked her to define these “fundamentals,” so that we could better judge whether or not they are worth the lives and limbs of our children. Most of those young men and women believe they are there to win, and lots of them complain that their rules of engagement seem more calculated to avoid accusations of excess than to defeat the enemy.