Condi Speaks, Obama's Thatch Hut Blows

If you want a good well articulated smack down of the Obama administration's foreign policy efforts, we get to hear from someone who has been in the trenches for the past eight years. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently weighed in.

On the recent excuse du jour to leave Afghanistan, that the recent elections were fraught with fraud and prove Afghanistan is not worth fighting for and we should leave. This is what Ms. Rice has to say:

Rice acknowledged flaws in Afghanistan's recent elections but quickly inserted an addendum bolstered by her personal credentials: "Our democracy wasn't so perfect at the beginning either. My ancestors were three-fifths of a man. My father tried to vote in 1952. You couldn't guarantee voting rights for blacks in the South until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. So don't tell me these people can't get it right because their democracies are struggling."

She grew up in Birmingham, AL amidst very violent discrimination under Jim Crow. How violent? When Condoleezza was nine, a childhood playmate of her's, Denise McNair, was one of the four little girls killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptish Church. So she has the moral authority to speak on this country's flaws I think, yet she still loves this country and sees clearly its greatness.

And for those who think we have no reason to stay in Afghanistan because it seems to becoming unpopular at home. That we should just pack up and leave, this is what she had to say:

"The last time we left Afghanistan, and we abandoned Pakistan," she said, "that territory became the very territory on which Al Qaeda trained and attacked us on September 11th. So our national security interests are very much tied up in not letting Afghanistan fail again and become a safe haven for terrorists."

Those who argue for simple abandonment, it seems clear they want to return to the time before 9/11. To that vacation from history the Clinton adminsitration presided over as Al Qaeda gathered strength, Afghanistan fell into Taliban hands, and the remote mountainous country became the planning and training area for those attacks which shattered the peace and life of New York City and Washingtom DC and hence the whole country.

After reading this article, I am thinking of a Rice/Palin ticket in 2012 or maybe a Palin/Rice one.