Condi Rice Can Kiss My Black Ass

Noam Chomsky said something once. Lots of things, actually, but only one is relevant to today’s discussion. “If whenever you read the newspaper, read the last paragraph first. There’s usually something interesting in there.”

And, by God, the old Jew is still on the money. Don’t take my word for it: let’s try an experiment. Yesterday’s Washington Post has a modest little puff piece on Condi Rice written by Staff Wordslinger Glen Kessler. Title: The Power-Values Approach to Policy. The last paragraph reads as such:

“ ‘The reality is that 'multi-polarity' was never a unifying idea, or a vision,’ Rice said. ‘It was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but it did not promote the triumph of peace. Multi-polarity is a theory of rivalry, of competing interests—and at it worst—competing values’—which, she said, led to World War I, World War II and the Cold War.”

Right off the bat you gotta ask yourself: “Multi-polarity”? That’s a new one on me, another entry in my rapidly expanding “Bush-speak” dictionary. It’s best to nail these phrases down as soon as they appear because they tend to have two (or sometimes three) meanings: the official and the real. So, interest peeked, we proceed to the front of the article. The first paragraph:

“Condoleezza Rice, whom President Bush nominated last week as his next secretary of state, was pegged early in her career as a disciple of the ‘realist’ school exemplified by Henry A. Kissinger, more concerned with great-power relations than moral issues. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she has been viewed as an enabler of the ‘neo-conservative idealism’ that believes evil governments must be confronted -- and toppled.”

Ah, yes. Kissinger. And in my head I can hear a young William Shatner call for Yellow Alert. It’ll be a short lived Yellow, thanks to the following bit four paragraphs later:

“At their core, [Condi’s] speeches and writings reveal a determined individual willing to knock aside established doctrines, especially in this period of international turmoil, but grounded in a strong belief in American values and the essential good of U.S. power.”

Emphasis mine, of course, because that’s the key. With a little bit of decoding the meat and potatoes of this bit becomes clear. “[W]illing to knock aside established doctrines,” is kind of a softball. There’s almost no need to ask, “Which established doctrines?” because we all know the answers well enough by now. If not, there’s always the public record. Inalienable human rights, national sovereignty, the Geneva Convention, personal privacy (except for the Chief Executive Officer, that is)…these mean little or nothing to a “realist” like Condi Rice, as anyone who survived the Kissinger Era can tell you. Why? Simple, really. Condi doesn’t need to trouble herself with such piddling things. After all, she’s got that “strong belief in American values and the essential good of U.S. power.”

That phrase is harder to shift through, given all this talk of “values” lately. Given that we’re reading the Washington Post “America values” means “whatever the hell the Party in power says it means.” What they say changes with time and tide…except for one thing, the Core, if you will: this belief in “the essential good of U.S. power”.

To them (and by “them” I don’t just mean the Bush-ies; this belief is as widespread and dangerous as AIDS) the United States is a golden land of selfless, kind-hearted people who (by virtue of our infallible Democratic System) throw up naught but selfless, kind-hearted leaders. We may (or may not, depending on who you talk to) have made some mistakes in the past but that’s the past, for fuck’s sake, and in American we are always looking forward. Not that there’s any need to worry: our selfless, kind-hearted leaders will never abuse their authority, or betray the public trust. They certainly won’t launch long, bloody, pre-emptive wars for anything other than the most serious of reasons.

And what’s more, they never have. Ever. Not once in our glorious 238 year history. Anyone who tells you different is being “un-American.”

With this as our background, this doctrine of “the essential good of U.S. power” becomes crystal clear. We, being America, are always in the right, no matter what we do or how we chose to do it. After all, we’re America, the Most Powerful Nation in the Free World. This, the foundation of the Kissinger Foreign Policy Worldview (paraphrased as “might makes right, so go fuck yourself”—sounds a little like the Dick Cheney worldview, doesn’t it?) means never having to say you’re sorry. Indeed, we never have.

Those prisoners we’ve tortured in Cuba and/or Iraq? Hell, they were all guilty anyway, because we said they are, and being that we’re a nation of selfless, kind-hearted people, what possible reason would we have to lie? So, yes, they were all guilty.

“Even,” some of you might ask, “the dead ones?”

Oh, especially the dead ones.

Those 1200 dead bodies rotting in Falluja? They were all insurgents. Every single one. Not a single civilian died during the entire operation. Every house we leveled was a nesting ground of brown-skinned devils bent on raping our women and selling our children to the Red Chinese. In fact, we’ve never bombed a civilian target in the entire course of our military history. Because that would be wrong, a slight to our high-minded American values.

“Well,” some of you might ask, “what about Dresdin? Or Hanoi? Or Kabul? Or Tokyo? Or Hiroshima?”

Those were all military targets. Every single one.

“But I heard that the first atomic bomb went wide of its target and blew up 100 feet above a hospital full of burn victims from the previous week's firebombings.”

This, like most facts that jibe with the Doctrine of Essential Good, would likely earn you a pregnant silence, followed by something to the effect of, “Why do you hate America?”

Oh, I don’t know. Maybe its because American seems to be governed by two-faced, nihilistic thugs who don’t even have the common decency to come up with original lies. Instead,

“Rice argues that ‘the terrorist ideology is the direct heir to communism, and Nazism, and fascism -- the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. The struggle against terror is fundamentally a struggle of vision and values.’”

You like that? This, ladies and gentlemen, is our new Secretary of State (since, at this point, there seems to be nothing standing between any of Bush’s appointees and their shiny new jobs—certainly not an opposition party). Seems to have a nice, balanced, educated understanding of the Enemy, don’t you think? There’s the little matter of it being completely ass backwards, but since when has that stopped the Chimpanzee Man and his herd of pigs?

Remember, from their (and again, I use the all-inclusive, bi-partisan their) perspective, “terrorism” (defined as “the terrorism they do to us”—we like to mask our “terrorism” behind phrases like “counter-insurgency” or “low-intensity conflict”) must be the heir to communism and Nazism. How else can they justify these massive, overseas military adventures and the billions of dollars they cost us every day? Never mind that, twenty years ago, Rice’s old boss, Ronald Reagan, called these terrorists “freedom fighters.” Never mind that (unlike Nazism and Stalinist state-communism) these “terrorists” have specific (and, for the most part, reconcilable) grievances with the United States that are well known and widely circulated…and (if government documents are to be believed) have been known (and ignored) since the Eisenhower Administration. Never mind that Christians and Muslims both worship the Nameless God of Abraham, and that their fundamentalist visions and values are (once they’re stripped of their cultural specifics) indistinguishable from each other. Since we (America) are so damn good they cannot be anything but the latest incarnation of Ultimate Evil. Because you can't have one without the Other.

Back to the Post article, page two, paragraph three:

“In an article in 2000 for Foreign Affairs, the bible of foreign policy thinking, Rice wrote that (sic) ‘power matters, both the exercise of power by the United States and the ability of others to exercise it.’”

(Which is true, but that doesn’t mean you should take that sentence at face value. As any survivor of the Sixties can tell you, Kissinger-ian Realism requires the United States to destroy “the ability of others to exercise [power]” by any means necessary. After all, you think the U.S. got to be the Most Powerful Nation in the World by letting other nations exercise power? As the young Lenord Nemoy in my head might say, "I find your logic...deeply flawed.")

Back to the same paragraph:

“But [Condi] said that because many in the United States are uncomfortable with the notion of great power, there is ‘a reflexive appeal instead to notions of international law and norms, and the belief that the support of many states—or even better, of institutions like the United Nations—is essential to the legitimate exercise of power.’

“Rice instead argued that ‘multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves’ and the ‘United States has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose.’”

Or any of them, for matter. Because they’re all such pesky, inconvenient things. But we shouldn't trouble ourselves over them. After all, we're special (i.e., powerful).

“While Rice wrote that ‘it is simply not possible to ignore and isolate other powerful states that do not share those [American] values,’ she made the case that pursuing U.S. interests together with countries that share similar values, ‘the world becomes more prosperous, democratic and peaceful.’”

For us, that is…and maybe we’ll toss Tony Blair a few bones every now and again. He’s been such a good little doggie through all of this, and besides, he’s so cute. The rest of the world can (to paraphrase our Vice President) go fuck itself. Though we (being America) always reserve the right to break off a little piece for ourselves.

But we were trying to find a definition of “multi-polarity” weren’t we? Wow, this is turning into one all-hell of a tangent. Just as well, since it doesn’t even show up until the second-to-last paragraph.

“After the Iraq invasion, when French officials in particular were pressing the idea of trying to counter U.S. ‘hyperpower,’ Rice traveled to London in June 2003 to address the issue. She argued that it was essential for great powers to work together, not balance each other in a constant state of tension.

“The reality is that 'multi-polarity' was never a unifying idea, or a vision,’ Rice said. ‘It was a necessary evil that sustained the absence of war but it did not promote the triumph of peace. Multi-polarity is a theory of rivalry, of competing interests—and at it worst—competing values’ -- which, she said, led to World War I, World War II and the Cold War.”

So. “Multi-polarity” is what we in the biz used to call a “balance of power.” Just how it “sustained the absence of war” and led to every major conflict of the 20th century is left unexplained. I’m not sure even Condi could address the issue. She’ probably end up asking me why I hate America.

I’ve got my reasons. The “terrorists” have theirs. But we (as a nation) aren’t going to get anywhere unless we have leaders who are willing to take the time, study the record, and take long, hard, honest looks at the answers to that famous question our Chimpanzee Man is so fond of asking. That old saw, "Why do they hate us?"

This rather simple exercise in intellectual honesty is (from the evidence at hand) so far beyond Condi Rice it might as well be on Mars.

And this is the woman who will represent the United States (that means you, me, and your bean-snappin’ momma) to every country in the world.

Indeed, God help us all.