Mind the Gap!
Condi Rice made the embarassing admission on Sunday, that the State Department had underestimated the strength of Hamas. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming...It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse" she said. Indeed, the White House seems to have been blindsided by this issue at every turn. First they try to encourage Middle East democracy, then panic about the consequences. And now, having failed to win the election for Abbas, they are trying to enforce a series of stringent conditions on Hamas.
Proving themselves unable to fix an election amongst one of the most marginalized and oppressed populations in the world, must give the White House pause for thought. Yet perhaps there is no way the White House can produce the outcomes it wants, because it does not have a clear idea of what those outcomes would be. Instead they hope that the trumpets of the war on terror, or the banalities of democratization, will fill the space where their foreign policy should be. As we have noted before this drift can have destructive consequences.
Proving themselves unable to fix an election amongst one of the most marginalized and oppressed populations in the world, must give the White House pause for thought. Yet perhaps there is no way the White House can produce the outcomes it wants, because it does not have a clear idea of what those outcomes would be. Instead they hope that the trumpets of the war on terror, or the banalities of democratization, will fill the space where their foreign policy should be. As we have noted before this drift can have destructive consequences.
1 Comments:
This is a leadership that can't see a bus coming at the bus stop. They had a PDB saying al Qaeda determined to strike, an analysis of how terrorists could use airplanes as missles to strike sensitive targets, and the FBI was monitoring Saudis that were taking piloting lessons. Yet when Rice testified, she said "no one could have predicted they would do that".
Two of the worst disasters in US history happend on this administrations watch, both handled dreadfully (on 9/11 Peter Jennings actually asked on television something to the effect of "where is the president? We could use his leadership.") and they were powerless to manage either one. It can no longer be a surprise that they will be unprepared for anything that comes to pass. The Hamas victory is just one failure among many.
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