Will to Power

Condi Goddess of War by Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, GermanyA scathing, no-holds-barred reprobation of neoconservativism and the State Department’s so-called “transformational diplomacy” approach to proliferating democracy in the Middle East erupted from the pen of George Will this morning:

[Condoleezza Rice] seems to consider today’s turmoil preferable to the Middle East’s “false stability” of the past 60 years, during which U.S. policy “turned a blind eye to the absence of the democratic forces.”

It would be overreaching, according to Will for the U.S. to even consider becoming involved in a broader Mideast conflict — assuming that can be avoided — and the generally conservative columnist appears to be outraged at the likes of William Kristol and his scribes at the Neocon Weekly Standard:

One envies that publication’s powers of prophecy but wishes it had exercised them on the nation’s behalf before all of the surprises — all of them unpleasant — that Iraq has inflicted.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note foreshadowed today’s George Will entry by documenting attacks on Bill Kristol’s Standard in recent days by both Will and Juan Williams, and acknowledges Will with a Conservative With a Conscience award in a post today.

Leave it to conservative blogger Hugh Hewitt to label Will a GOP “drop out” and call for Senate hearings on U.S. action against mouthy Iran.

The irrational disconnect doesn’t stop there, and in fact, WH Spokesman Tony Snow completely disgraced himself and the white house in an exchange with Helen Thomas this morning. After incorrectly claiming the U.S. didn’t “veto” a statement regarding “Gaza” at the Middle East at the U.N. or as Snow called it: “…the V.N. — the U.N., whatever it is,” he went ahead and belittled the reknown Bush-critic Thomas by adding, “Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view.”

One Reply to “Will to Power”

  1. George Will has apparently joined your head in the Middle Eastern sand entourage. Iranian nukes don?t matter, what scares you are neoconservatives and Christian extremists. Glad you?ve discovered the enemy. Will writes, “…if Assad’s regime does not fall after The Weekly Standard’s hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?”

    Will surfaces amidst the same intellectual flotsam that circulates around liberal hot tubs. Any U.S. strike on Iraq, Afghanistan, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria or Iran would not represent “another war” but rather an attempt to clean up the same cesspool. To follow Will’s line of logic, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. should have refrained from fighting Germany or Italy because they represented different wars or an overextension of American resources. Will also suggests a containment strategy that allegedly worked against “Stalin and his successors.” Containment led to the communist extermination of tens of millions souls and the enslavement of hundreds of millions more. Flawed from the outset, containment became a strategy of expediency after the Soviets and Chinese acquired the bomb. That is, until Reagan moved beyond containment. If the U.S. waits until Iran acquires nukes, containment may be our only option. Teheran’s fanatics, however, may not be interested in a balance of terror, only wars of annihilation. A containment strategy would surrender the initiative to an intractable enemy and would only serve to convince the Islamic fanatics that we lack the will to defeat them. If we follow Will’s defeatism, they may be right. Instead, Iran, by unleashing her cats paw, Hezbollah, has provided Israel and the U.S. with justification to scourge this threat from Beirut to Damascus to Teheran. The U.S. has the means, the question remains does she have the will and resolution to act? A ceasefire that leaves the Iranian/terrorist threat from Beirut to Teheran intact, will present only an illusion of peace. We will still get war, only later and with any enemy much bolder and stronger than today.

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