Who is Condoleeza Rice, anyway ….?

It is not often that women become a party to mass murder on the same scale as that in which Condoleeza Rice now finds herself involved.  It might also be said that it requires a very special women to apparently enjoy the experience as much as she appears to do. It really is a quite frightening spectacle. The gruesome Dr. will soon be ranking with Boadicea as the most bloodstained women of all time and Boadicea at least had a relevant excuse - what’s hers? Of course, it might also be noted that the Queen of the Iceni confined her activities, mainly, to a couple of cities – albeit she did the job very thoroughly. The Secretary of State has subscribed to the rape of an entire nation and, judging from the ensuing chaos, has not done it at all thoroughly!! When I see that smile, with which she so deceivingly greets all and sundry I am reminded of the ‘Smile on the Face of the Tiger’ – another American invention.

I note from her biography that Condoleeza has spent much of her life in academia which probably accounts for her total lack of understanding of how real people think and behave in real situations. To come from such a background straight into the cesspit of politics, even if only as a hireling, will have done nothing to alleviate this situation particularly in the employ of a semi-literate President not wanting to hire anyone who he thinks might be brighter than he thinks that he is ! (You can spend a little time working that one out !!!) Whatever history she may have learned has obviously not taught her not to make the same mistakes all over again – but to be generous that is a typically general human error. She has equally, if not more so, apparently never bothered to study human nature – but then politicians never do because they are not interested in other people only, on occasion and when necessary, their votes; and they can, and do, lie and cheat for those.

Currently, of course, we are being treated to this quaint, and rather pathetic, little ‘Rice – Straw Duo’ charade. To be fair, he is no brighter than she is and has at least as much blood on his hands. Fred and Rose West only managed to kill 12 – and at the end he, at least, had the decency to kill himself ! But, back to the ‘Rice – Straw Duo’ busy in each other’s home towns telling each other how clever they both are and then off to try and work the oracle in Baghdad. Pressure to bear here, pressure to bear there, pressure, pressure, everywhere. I reprint below an extract from a news article written around two years ago:

U.S. Risks Repeating Britain's 1920 Mistakes in Iraq

William Choong, in the Straits Times (Singapore) (April 17, 2004):

A heavily armed military force from a Western country takes down a Middle Eastern regime which threatens Western interests in the region. A widespread revolt breaks out. This forces the invader to hand back power to elements of the former regime. Iraq? Obviously. But in describing the latest case of insurrection in the country, one could just as well be talking about Britain's Iraqi experience in the 1920s.

 'What happened in Iraq in 1920 so closely resembles the events now that only a historical ignoramus can be surprised,' writes Mr Niall Ferguson, the author of Empire: The Rise And Demise Of The British World Order And The Lessons For Global Power. The parallels are chilling.

During World War I, between 1914 and 1918, Britain overthrew an authoritarian regime in Baghdad. It then installed a political order that was respectful of British interests in the Persian Gulf. In 1920, a widespread revolt ensued, comprising the country's three main ethic groups - Shi'ites, Sunni and even the Kurds. It led to thousands of British casualties. By August that year, the desperate British commander even appealed to London for poison-gas shells - an option that Winston Churchill, then a secretary of state in the War Office, had also called for.

In the following years, Britain ceded control of the country to elites from the former regime - made up mostly of Sunnis and politicians not representative of the population. This scenario led to the emergence of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in the 1970s.

Well, well, well……………………….Do we ever learn ? Not if you are a Condoleeza Rice or a Jack Straw - and whilst power mad autocrats like Bush and Blair can find gullible fools like this comic opera duo to aid and abet them then the rest of us must suffer the consequences.

Just how did we get ourselves in to all this ?  There are two primary reasons and to understand them (oh joy, oh bliss) we are going to have to bore ourselves with a bit more history ! We are going to have to go back to the first Iraqi conflict and the complete cock-up that Bush senior made of that. I was staggered when Bush junior actually ran for President. The man has certainly got gall, if little else. I have always been at a loss to work out which of the two Bushes is the more stupid. One look at the little piggy eyes of Bush junior should be enough to put anyone off but the Yanks are as besotted with ‘parties’ as are we and they elected him. I assume they thought, if, unlike us, they bothered to think at all, that it really wasn’t possible to get two complete pillocks capable of  the same crass incompetence, in the same place and with the same regime, from the same ‘all American’ family. I’ve got news for them – it was possible and we are now all reaping the harvest. I have some more news for all those Americans who are now anti-Bush and anti-war – don’t blame him. He is his father’s son – you knew this and still elected him. The blame lies with YOU.

Bush senior went to war in Iraq with U.N blessing and a veneer of legality. Virtually everything was on his side. There was a just cause – the invasion of Kuwait. The fact that the actual reason for the U.S. intervention had sod all to do with Kuwait is really an irrelevancy. The reason was the purely selfish self interested need of the Americans to preserve their precious oil supplies – a large part of which (since Americans have never been taught that spoiled, greedy brats can’t necessarily always have it all their own way) they only need to satisfy their overwhelming greed. And he totally cocked it up. With thousands of years of history to tell him that when you have your man on the ropes you finish him off or suffer the inevitable consequences Bush senior let his man go. I’ll bet that Saddam Hussein really couldn’t believe that any one could be so cowardly or so unutterably stupid. I’ll bet he really couldn’t believe his luck. Is it any wonder that he subsequently behaved as he did. He firmly believed that he was dealing with a bunch of idiots – and I’ll let you into secret, he was right !!

Bush junior, having witnessed this total debacle, his father’s subsequent humiliation as a ‘one term’ President and the ongoing reminders of all of this engendered by the continuing presence of Saddam Hussein, eventually got himself elected to a position where he thought that he could perhaps do something about it. What he lacked was an excuse. The events of 11th. September 2001 gave him just that excuse.

If you are misguided enough to poke a Lion with your walking stick – he’ll savage you. If you likewise poke an American the effect is much the same. However, if you tweak the nose of an American administration then expect all hell to break loose. American governments having had their noses tweaked invariably react. No thought is involved; it is a reflex reaction. You sink the Lusitania and their foreign policy promptly does an about turn and they enter WW I. The same thing happened with Pearl Harbour (consequent upon a comparable incompetence that was later to facilitate 9 / 11) and WW II. There’s more – but that will do for now. Given a poke they lash out, kick arses and generally cause mayhem. They are not given to thinking ! Whether or not this consequential mayhem is, or is not, for the general good is pure chance and often a matter of opinion.

If we then add that the oldest political trick in the book is that if you have a domestic problem then the ideal way of diverting attention is to create an incident abroad then you can begin to see in which direction we are travelling. Bush junior badly wanted to terminate the ongoing reminder of his father’s stupidity. The concept that you cannot rectify one complete cock-up with another complete cock-up is, of course, way outside his mental compass so given that as a result of 9 / 11 he was undoubtedly going to lash out at somebody then it becomes pretty obvious who the target is going to be – and it was !! Let’s face it – the Yanks scuppered the League of Nations so they weren’t going to let an irrelevancy like the United Nations stand in their way. At the time he had a Secretary of State who had been actively involved (albeit against his own better judgement) in the original fiasco – how very convenient – but when he got tired and quit young Bush badly needed a replacement who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, think too deeply into all of the ramifications – and it looks like he’s found her.

Meanwhile we have the serious ongoing tale of the irresistible force meeting up with the immoveable object moderated by a bit of comic relief from this rather pathetic duo of Rice and Straw with their complete failure to understand what is going on, why it is going on, how their gullible enthusiasm is being exploited by forces greater and more devious than them and that Iraq, in its present form, is totally ungovernable except by someone rather like ----Saddam Hussein !