Rice Still Doesn't Get It
In confirmation hearings yesterday, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's nominee for Secretary of State, sidestepped multiple opportunities to reveal some depth of moral and intellectual concern for the grave situation in Iraq. At every turn, her response was simply that things are going great and that history will be kind to President Bush.
- Rice confirmed that the Bush administration has no viable exit plan for Iraq. Rice yesterday refused to offer any idea if and when American troops might be withdrawn from Iraq. Citing concern among Iraqi and American officials that the U.S. plans to cut and run in Iraq, Sen. Biden (D-DE) asked Rice if there was any "reasonable possibility that the United States would withdraw the bulk of its forces before the end of 2005." Rice replied, "I can't judge that."
- Rice drastically overstated the number of trained Iraqi forces. Any viable exit strategy for Iraq must included hundreds of thousands of trained Iraqi armed forces. Due to the administration's early mismanagement of the war, and its inability to bring in international support for training efforts, we are nowhere near that number. Yet, Rice yesterday estimated that the number of Iraq trained forces was "somewhere over 120,000." Biden, who was recently in Iraq, sharply contradicted her: "I think you'll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces."
- Like Alberto Gonzales, Rice refused to condemn torture committed by Americans. Rice declined to make a clear statement against the use of torture yesterday. Citing instances of forced nudity and simulated drowning as interrogation techniques, Sen. Dodd (D-CT) asked Rice, "What are your views on that, is that torture, in your view, or not?" Rice "declined to characterize" the abusive methods, saying such determinations were made by the justice department and that it wouldn't be "appropriate" for her to comment.
