CONDOLEEZZA RICE GOES TO THE SEASHORE
In Jules Dassin’s 1960 comedy Never on Sunday Melina Mercouri’s Piraeus demimondaine weeps at the awful denouement of “Medea,” but cheers up when the actors take their curtain call. They didn’t die after all, Mercouri exclaims, adding, “And they all went to the seashore.” Former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has written a report, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom, on the tragic failure of democratic movements in the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere, but with the sad bits left out. So convinced is she of democracy’s inevitable triumph that every story has a happy ending.
How’s that for the opening of a review of a geopolitical memoir ? David P. Goldman walks the reader through Condoleeza Rice’s memories and regrets along the historical ditches of the George W. Bush administration.
Reading this review brings clarity in exposing the delusions of our elite political leaders. It’s really astonishing to read some of things Rice puts to paper. It was no less astonishing to watch the international news media celebrating and bootlicking their way through rioting crowds of Islamic madmen while declaring Arab Spring the dawn of a new age of peace, love and tranquility. The performances were so bad by reporters and anchors, it was almost hard not to be embarassed for them.
But this is how our former national security advisor and Secretary State describes it.
Still, Rice concludes her account of Egypt’s “Arab Spring,” in effect, they all went to the seashore: “despite these dark prospects and the repression unleashed by the Sisi regime, the dream of a freer and more democratic Egypt lives on. It can be seen in the stories of activists who, at great personal risk to themselves, continue to advocate for [sic] reforms.” It is of no consequence to her that half of Egyptians are functionally illiterate, that nine tenths of adult women (according to the World Health Organization) have undergone genital mutilation, and that Egypt imports half its total caloric consumption, feeding about half its people on subsidized bread. The country lives on loans from the Gulf States and the International Monetary Fund, and would starve without $20 billion of remittances from Egyptians working overseas. It holds on to social cohesion and life itself with difficulty. Yet Rice reduces Egypt’s tortuous story to that of a few Western-educated activists. “Someday Egypt’s future will be brighter,” she writes, “and [the activists] will have another opportunity to build their dream. It might be a far-off and distant future. But those who think otherwise discount the human yearning to be free.” In the meantime Rice discounts the human yearning to be fed.
and this,
Culture doesn’t matter for Condoleezza Rice, who reduces the world to simple ideological categories. Her contribution to misguided American policies has been substantial. America hasn’t begun to pay for the consequences of her mistakes. The Bush Administration and its successor spent over $4 trillion to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nearly 7,000 American dead and more than 50,000 wounded. What do we have to show for it? Iraq “continues to function in a quasi-democratic fashion—the institutions are weak but at least present.… Freedom of religion is guaranteed….[y]et religious minorities are being driven out of the country…because the government cannot protect them from sectarian militias and terrorists,” reports Rice. Moreover, “The Iranians will have free rein if there is no American counterweight,” by which she means, I presume, boots on the ground—that is, more of the same things that failed in the past.
Goldman is right and almost always is since he’s usually the smartest man in the room.
RTWDT.
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