Things Are Clarified Now

George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice on their way on July 14 to the Group Eight Summit (Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch)

Condoleezza Rice, in a press briefing yesterday at the Group Eight Summit, on why the main objective in the Middle East is not simply a cease-fire:

QUESTION: Why not call for a cease-fire until you can get back on that political path?

SECRETARY RICE:  We want a sustainable cessation of violence.  I —

QUESTION: — you want the violence to end?

SECRETARY RICE:  I can tell you that — of course, we want violence to end.  But I can tell you right now if violence ends on the basis of somehow Hezbollah or Hamas continuing to hold in their hands the capabilities anytime they wish to start launching rockets again into Israel, if violence ends on the basis of no change in the underlying political support for Resolution 1559 or for the work that President Abbas is doing, if violence ends on the basis of Syria and Iran being able to turn on the key again anytime, we will have achieved very, very little, indeed, and we will be right back here, perhaps in a worse circumstance because the terrorists will assume that nobody is willing to take on what has been a very clear assault now on the progress that is being made by moderate forces in the Middle East. . . .

* * *

And I want to say just a word about this notion that somehow this all arose in the last couple of years, because we’ve been calling for democracy and things have gotten stirred up in the Middle East.  There was a false stability in the Middle East over the last several years that produced a set of circumstances and an atmosphere so malignant that you had the rise of extremist forces like al Qaeda.  So the notion that somehow the Middle East — which has, of course, been a violent place now for any — for a lot of years — that the Middle East was somehow undisturbed, and because now we are fighting extremism, because now we are pressing for a democratic voice for the people of the Middle East, that somehow that has now caused the current crisis I think is grotesque.

What you had in the Middle East before was American policies — bipartisan, by the way, it had been pursued by Democratic Presidents and by Republican Presidents — that engaged in so-called Middle East exceptionalism and was pursuing stability at the expense of democracy, and it turned out . . . was getting neither. . . .

And it will be difficult, but we are at an important juncture right now, because extremists have showed their hand. . . . That’s what’s really happened here.  And they’ve showed that their sponsors are in Tehran and in Damascus.  Things are clarified now.

Rice was echoing a theme that George W. Bush set earlier in the day.  Here is what the President had to say, in answers to multiple questions:

One of the interesting things about this recent flare-up is that it helps clarify a root cause of instability in the Middle East — and that’s Hezbollah and Hezbollah’s relationship with Syria, and Hezbollah’s relationship to Iran, and Syria‘s relationship to Iran.

Therefore, in order to solve this problem it’s really important for the world to address the root cause. . . . [O]therwise there may be apparent calm and then all of a sudden there will be more conflict. . . .

[T]his is a moment of clarification. It’s becoming clear for everybody to see some of the root causes of instability. . . . [O]ne of the interesting things about this moment is it’s now become clear to a lot of people why we don’t have peace in the Middle East. It’s a moment of clarification. And therefore, it’s a moment that requires all of us to work together, to send a clear message, not only to Hezbollah, but to the Iranians, who finance Hezbollah, and to the Syrians who house Hezbollah. . . .

And I repeat, there are two nation states that are very much involved with stopping the advance of peace, and that would be Iran, and that would be Syria.

Bush and Rice, like Reagan before them, are hedgehogs (Natan Sharansky is another one).  In the end, they have a greater historical impact than the foxes struggling with their long lists of nuanced issues. 

The home addresses of terror have been publicly named.  One of them is working as fast as it can to develop nuclear weapons to wipe Israel off the face of the map, dominate the Middle East and threaten Europe into submission.  The other is run by a Baathist dictatorship that wants to help.  Both of them have sent their proxies across international borders into Israel. What response to this threat would be “proportionate?”

Speaking of foxes, the New York Times devoted a one-paragraph review yesterday to Madeline Albright’s latest book.  The review began as follows:

In her latest book, Albright, the former secretary of state, says she remembers coming across articles in foreign policy journals "about ‘Islamic extremists’ " throughout the 1990’s and, "in meeting after meeting," she’d find herself "scrawling on a notepad, ‘Learn more about Islam.’"  She can cross it off her to-do list. . . .

Things are clarified now.