Condi Rice criticizes Obama's leadership, proves she lacks anything resembling self-awareness or perspective

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Condi and Dubya. Sort of.

So Condi Rice is on the anti-Obama bandwagon, just like her pals Cheney and Rummy and rest of the detritus of the Bush II presidency:

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Barack Obama of dramatically weakening the United States' position in the world, drawing a straight line between Obama's ever-yielding foreign policy and the increasing troubles around the world.

"Right now, there's a vacuum," she told a crowd of more than two thousand attending the National Republican Congressional Committee's annual dinner last night in Washington, D.C. "There's a vacuum because we've decided to lower our voice. We've decided to step back. We've decided that if we step back and lower our voice, others will lead, other things will fill that vacuum." Citing Bashar al Assad's slaughter in Syria, Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine, al Qaeda's triumphant return to Fallujah, Iraq, and China's nationalist fervor, she concluded: "When America steps back and there is a vacuum, trouble will fill that vacuum."

Oh, the sheer stupidity of the everything-is-Obama's-fault crowd, which is pretty much the same as the America-as-imperial-global-hegemon crowd, as if the president of the United States, any which one, can just snap his, or her, fingers and make the world bow before America's overwhelming might. That sort of worldview, connected to neoconservative ideological fervor, is as ignorant and childish as it is astoundingly dangerous and self-destructive.

And if you're looking to find fault for weakening America's standing in the world, how about, oh, throwing some blame at those who ignored a pre-9/11 CIA memo called "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," launched a second war on false pretenses (i.e., lies) while a first was still going on, and grossly mismanaged that second war while ignoring the first, turning Iraq into a chaotic vacuum and failing to do the job in Afghanistan, allowing al Qaeda and others to continue to thrive while also creating the conditions for terrorism as a movement and threat to grow in strength, all the while weakening America's core alliances, thoroughly obliterating its credibility and moral standing in the world as well as its capacity to engage militarily beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and making the American people even more isolationist than ever.

And by the way, included among those who deserve that blame is not the president who rebuilt America's alliances, credibilty, and moral standing in the world, put an end to the bloody quagmire of a war in Iraq and the going-nowhere war in Afghanistan, shifted America's military resources to target al Qaeda, against enormous risk gave the green light to the operation to take out bin Laden, directly as a result of the new focus on al Qaeda, opened up diplomatic relations with Iran so as to work towards long-term peace and stability in the Middle East and to turn that country away from its nuclear ambitions, helped put an end to the brutal Qaddafi regime in Libya, and has otherwise carefully guided the U.S. through delicate international crises, from the Arab Spring to Syria to the current situation in the Ukraine, at a time when the American people want nothing of intervention and when there's really only so much even the president of the United States can do to achieve America's foreign policy goals.

So you said what, Condi? And you're blaming whom? Huh.