A friend sent me article. I tried to find the webpage but could not. But i did find the entire article at this webpage--reprinted.
The title of the article on this webpage is:
The Flawed Rice Doctrine of ‘Transformational Diplomacy’ and American Global Policy
But has a new title below (although the text is the same).
http://www.japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=540-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Condi's failed policy thinking
Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:53:59 -0600
From: xxxx
To: xxxxx
3-06-06
Why Condi Rice's Foreign Policy Approach Is Flawed
By Walter LaFeber
Mr. LaFeber is the Tisch University Professor at Cornell, and author of America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945-2002.
In her January 18, 2006 speech at Georgetown University, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice attracted attention by arguing that U.S. foreign policy would henceforth be shaped by a “transformational diplomacy . . . rooted in partnership, not paternalism.” Her address was taken by some observers to mean that the neoconservative policy assumptions which have condemned the United States to the tragedy in Iraq and elsewhere were being replaced by a realist perspective taking American policy back to the more constructive days of the partnerships George Marshall and Dean Acheson (whom she singled out for praise in her question-and-answer session), formed with Western Europe and Japan. These partnerships aimed to institutionalize both the rebuilding of those war-devastated partners and the containment of the Soviet Union.
A closer reading of her speech leads to another conclusion: the address is mostly old, failed policy dressed in necessarily different rhetoric. Most significantly, Rice began the speech not by emphasizing partnership, but with George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address from which she quoted that it is U.S. policy “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” This “mission,” Rice added, is “transformational diplomacy,” and nowhere does she say this diplomacy came out of any partnership – which is well, because it didn’t.
Nor could it. Only a person ignorant of human history could seriously discuss “ending tyranny in our world.” Rice’s putative hero, Dean Acheson, told a group of military and diplomatic officers in 1949 that the idea that good and evil could not coexist in the world was the height of absurdity. Good and evil, Acheson noted in his own inimitable fashion, had coexisted ever since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, and given the historical record (and, one might add, nuclear weapons) , such coexistence, this Cold Warrior believed, had to continue. The partners Rice has in mind tend to see the world through Acheson’s eyes, not the President’s or, apparently, her own.. Given Acheson and the partners’ long historical view and insights into human nature, they did not, and do not, believe that “tyranny” can be eradicated everywhere; it is rooted in a human nature that cannot be changed, only contained. Bush and Rice’s religious views, and the President’s faith in American military power, may lead them to believe human nature can be universally cleansed to suit their idealism, but all of recorded history is on the side of Acheson and the partners.
“If you’re relativist about right and wrong, then you can’t lead,” Rice told the Georgetown audience in her question and answer session. That axiom indeed served Bush well in winning elections by overly simplifying security issues. But it became an albatross around the neck of U.S. diplomacy when the President bragged he would call evil by its proper name, proclaimed Iran and North Korea as parts of the Axis of Evil – and now, with Iraq in near civil war and U.S. strategic options disappearing, he finds it necessary to bargain with the Iranians to prevent civil war in Iraq and essentially turn the North Koreans over to China and South Korea who have quite a different approach to Kim Il Sung’s regime than does, or did, Bush. Rice’s remarks contain the kind of good/evil dichotomy that many Americans love to hear, but such a dichotomy has little to do with the world they have to deal with in 2006. Evil exists, but the lesson of the past three years leads to the conclusion that the evil of terrorism should have been dealt with not by holding elections or deploying U.S. Marine divisions in Iraq. It could have been better dealt with, as Professor Michael Howard argued in a remarkable (and remarkably ignored) article in the January/February 2002 Foreign Affairs, by covert, combined intelligence operations directed against terrorist cells. Among other implications, Howard’s recommendation could have led to the killing or capture of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri (who has been linked to recent bombings in Europe) in Tora Bora during late 2001-2002, instead of pulling out the U.S. Special Forces and covert agents who were pursuing him and sending them to Iraq. The worst possible tactic, Howard warned, would be war (especially, one assumed, a virtually go-it-alone conflict falsely labeled a preemptive war) against an Islamic nation-state that would generate more jihadists than it eliminated......
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