What is “Why is the United States legally obligated to provide Israel with new military hardware whenever that nation feels a bit insecure?”
Yes, it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law! The Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008 amended the Arms Control Export Act of 1976 to require that any U.S. arms transactions in [...]

Blaming our country’s woes exclusively on the people who have most directly wrought them—Bush, Cheney, torture maven David Addington et al—becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the refusal by Democratic party leaders to confer accountability, let alone make any attempt to visit some sort of necessarily inadequate justice, upon the administration.
The party’s presidential [...]

George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he’s not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.
Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest in counter-terrorism [...]

Condi did it.
No, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice didn’t pull the trigger or build the bomb or hire the assassin, but it was the U.S. effort to force Pakistan’s dictator, Pervex Musharraf, into a power-sharing arrangement with Bhutto that led directly to her death.
Steve Clemons, proprietor of the Washington Note and an up-and-coming member [...]

My friend Cell Whitman emailed me a few days ago about a C-SPAN interview with the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. Kessler was discussing U.S. – Soviet relations, and the difficulties they present putative Russia expert Condoleezza Rice, when he let fly with this little gem about Bush and Putin:
[A]t his very first meeting with Putin, [...]

U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice appears to have reverted to her Cold War roots with her announcement last month, in tandem with fellow cold warrior and US defense secretary Robert Gates, that the US intends to sell some $20 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab [...]

The Washington Post reported Sunday on a Pentagon official in Iraq who has drawn the ire of other government officials by unilaterally reconstituting some of that country’s state-owned industries.
Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better [...]

Germany has become the second European country to issue arrest warrants for CIA agents involved in kidnapping terrorism suspects for transportation to third countries where the suspects are abused and often tortured. German citizen Khaled El-Masri was snatched from the German border, flown to Afghanistan where he was beaten and tortured, and was then dumped [...]

There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq…

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice granted an interview to three somewhat incurious New York Times reporters on Friday. During the course of it she implied that Iraq would be unsalvageable if Baghdad wasn’t under control by sometime this summer and, in bits and pieces, identified concerns about Iran that echo, sometimes almost verbatim, those [...]

President Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice have both been drawing hopeful analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. What Vietnam teaches us, they say, is that over time old enemies can reconcile and a war-torn nation can chart a happy future. This is both true and, in context, unbelievably bizarre.
To review: the US spent 15 [...]

You’ll know Baghdad is safe for human habitation when a Bush administration official can announce a visit to Iraq’s capitol in advance. That won’t happen before the clock runs out on the administration in January of 2009: the city isn’t safe for anyone, even inside the alternate reality known as the Green Zone, and it’s [...]

The hardest part of writing about the Bush administration’s record on national security is knowing where to begin. The second hardest part is knowing where to end; it’s simplest just to let physical exhaustion be one’s guide. Today, we’re going to begin with the draft.
Very few people think the Bush administration will institute a military [...]

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has told US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to back off with respect to Israel’s attack on Lebanon. That’s according to Steve Clemons, who writes on foreign policy and has what he describes as reliable sources within the state department.

A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say.
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen got a copy of the memo (Acrobat file) and [...]

A memo from the US embassy in Iraq to the US state department offers a bleak assessment of life for Iraqi employees of the embassy. As dark as it is, though, the memo may be more significant for what it doesn’t say.

Foreign leaders make a fuss. The president makes a face. The secretary of state makes a complicated color-coded calendar. A new policy is born. If White House aides speaking anonymously to the New York Times are to be believed, that’s how the US came to decide talks with Iran, or at least the potential for talks with Iran, might not be such a bad idea.

Attorneys for Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, the two former AIPAC officials indicted for receiving classified information from former Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin, are preparing to subpoena several current and former Bush administration officials.

British foreign minister Jack Straw and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice delivered a stern message to Iraqi leaders today. Flying to Baghdad after tea in Blackburn, Lancastershire — thereby skewing calculations on how many ‘holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall — the pair told Iraq’s president and prime minister that the failure to form a central government was contributing to violence in Iraq and reflected a certain hurtful contempt toward Iraq’s liberators.

US secretary of state Condi Rice added a little sizzle to her South American tour by accepting a guitar inlaid with a coca leaf from Bolivia’s president Evo Morales.

A friend of mine recently began writing a “three-dot” column, one of those exercises in stringing together otherwise unrelated items of gossip, celebrity spotting and local news. Washington Post reporter/columnist/man about town Dana Milbank has recently taken up a three-dot column at Slate, although he has so far refused to acknowledge the inherent dottiness of it. It occurs to me that this ethereal and short-attention-span format lends itself to coverage of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress as no other can, which is probably why the institutional press have covertly adopted it.

You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. Washington Post blogger (and doesn’t that sound odd) Jeff Morley posted an item on Wednesday about the shuttering of the State Department’s international media survey site, concluding with the suggestion that “U.S. officials still want to know what the world thinks of the United States. They just no longer care to share that information with the rest of the government or the American public.”

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is set to embark on a diplomatic campaign aimed at easing European Union concerns about the existence of secret Europe-based CIA prisons housing kidnapped or otherwise off-the-books prisoners of the War on Terra^® who are subjected to abuse or torture. Her tack: “The US doesn’t torture anyone, and if we do, you’re helping us. But we don’t.”

Time doesn’t say when the interviews with Rice and others for the profile were conducted, but it’s likely most of them were done before the week ending today saw the deaths of more than 30 US troops and another 200 or so Iraqi civilians and police. (A reminder: Iraq has less than a tenth the population of the US. During much of this year, the country has been experiencing the equivalent of a 911-scale loss of life every two weeks or so. Men, women, children, babies, and most of them have nothing to do with the war other than getting blown up in it by us or insurgents or terrorists or their own armed forces.)

Yesterday, BTC News noted secretary of state Condi Rice’s plea for people to “stop making excuses for terrorists.” Today, via Newsweek, we note that the US has provided yet another such excuse.

Led by Dick Cheney, the administration adamantly oppose efforts by congressional Republicans to moderate the administration’s contempt for international treaties and other standards of behavior for treatment of prisoners. Led by Don Rumsfeld, the administration adamantly refuse to forswear permanent military bases in Iraq. Led by an entire cabal of clueless idelogues, the administration refuse to acknowledge that their own behavior has an impact on the other side’s more clued in ideologues; the ones who make terrorist recruiting posters from every bit of Bush administration arrogance and inhumanity.

On May 10, Raja Nawaf Farhan al-Mahalawi, the newly appointed governor of Iraq’s Anbar province, was kidnapped by insurgents.
Five days later, according to news reports, he was freed.
But today, more than two weeks after he was freed, he was “found dead along with his militant captors after a clash with U.S. forces.”
Notice anything unusual in [...]

In Ireland on Monday, Condi Rice warned Syria to tighten control of the 600 mile border between Syria and Iraq, saying that the Syrian regime was allowing militants to cross the border and join the Iraq insurgency.
Syria, which has a considerably smaller and overwhelmingly less sophisticated military than does the US, may be turning a [...]

The London Sunday Times confirms what everyone not swooning over the accent suspected about Tony Blair’s involvement in the invasion of Iraq.
A SECRET document from the heart of government reveals today that Tony Blair privately committed Britain to war with Iraq and then set out to lure Saddam Hussein into providing the legal justification.
The [...]

Rice, typically, finds the problem not to be Bolton’s behavior but the people who are talking about Bolton’s behavior.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has quietly scuttled the State Department’s annual terrorism survey, whichreportedly indicates that 2004 was the worst year ever in terms of terrorism incidents. And the count excludes Iraq.

Condoleezza Rice is getting off to a strong start in the 2008 campaign season.
A number of the blogs linked above cite California Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s introduction of Rice to the Senate foreign relations committee, particularly this excerpt:
The problems we face abroad are complex and sizable. If Dr. Rice’s past performance is any indication, though, [...]

I learned a new acronym a few days ago: BOHICA. It stands for “Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.”
A number of administration luminaries haven’t been much in evidence of late. Colin Powell turns up in the odd third-world country now and again; Steven Friedman, the Bush* economic guru, and Greg Mankiw, the other economic guru, [...]