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Bret Stephens on why Susan Rice is the perfect candidate for SecState under this administration. She has a record of failure almost as complete as the president’s. Perhaps she can be the next US president. American voters like failures.
The trouble with a newspaper column lies in the word limit. Last week, I wrote about some of Susan Rice‘s diplomatic misadventures in Africa during her years in the Clinton administration: Rwanda, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo. But there wasn’t enough space to get to them all.
And Sierra Leone deserves a column of its own.
On June 8, 1999, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Ms. Rice, then the assistant secretary of state for African affairs, delivered testimony on a range of issues, and little Sierra Leone was high on the list. An elected civilian government led by a former British barrister named Ahmad Kabbah had been under siege for years by a rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front, led by a Libyan-trained guerrilla named Foday Sankoh. Events were coming to a head.
Even by the standards of Africa in the 1990s, the RUF set a high bar for brutality. Its soldiers were mostly children, abducted from their parents, fed on a diet of cocaine and speed. Its funding came from blood diamonds. It was internationally famous for chopping off the limbs of its victims. Its military campaigns bore such names as “Operation No Living Thing.”
In January 1999, six months before Ms. Rice’s Senate testimony, the RUF laid siege to the capital city of Freetown. “The RUF burned down houses with their occupants still inside, hacked off limbs, gouged out eyes with knives, raped children, and gunned down scores of people in the street,” wrote Ryan Lizza in the New Republic. “In three weeks, the RUF killed some 6,000 people, mostly civilians.”
What to do with a group like this? The Clinton administration had an idea. Initiate a peace process. …
… It would be tempting to blame Rev. Jackson for the debacle that would soon follow. But as Ms. Rice was keen to insist in her Senate testimony that June, it was the Africa hands at the State Department who were doing most of the heavy lifting.
“It’s been through active U.S. diplomacy behind the scenes,” she explained. “It hasn’t gotten a great deal of press coverage, that we and others saw the rebels and the government of Sierra Leone come to the negotiating table just a couple of weeks ago, in the context of a negotiated cease-fire, in which the United States played an important role.” …
… Three months later, the RUF took 500 U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and was again threatening Freetown. Lomé had become a dead letter. The State Department sought to send Rev. Jackson again to the region, but he was so detested that his trip had to be canceled. The U.N.’s Kofi Annan begged for Britain’s help. Tony Blair obliged him.
“Over a number of weeks,” Mr. Blair recalls in his memoirs, British troops “did indeed sort out the RUF. . . . The RUF leader Foday Sankoh was arrested, and during the following months there was a buildup of the international presence, a collapse of the rebels and over time a program of comprehensive disarmament. . . . The country’s democracy was saved.”
Today Mr. Blair is a national hero in Sierra Leone. As for Ms. Rice and the administration she represented, history will deliver its own verdict.
Jennifer Rubin explores three aspects of obama foreign policy failures.
The president has tried to convince the American people, our allies and our foes that the (Afghan) war could be conducted with less than optimal numbers of troops and with a strict timetable. That just isn’t so. He is now faced with a dilemma: Continue in lock-step with his emphatic 2014 withdrawal date or rethink his approach. At some point, it is hard to justify the no-man’s land (neither aiming for victory nor departing promptly) in which young men and women continue to die. If we aren’t going to win, why prolong the agony?
Then there is Syria. The Associated Press reports: “The Obama administration is declaring a Syrian rebel group with alleged ties to al-Qaida as a terrorist organization. It’s an effort to blunt the influence of extremists as the U.S. steps up cooperation with the Syrian opposition. The State Department’s action blocks Jabhat al-Nusra’s assets in the U.S. and bars Americans from doing business with the group.”
We are racing to catch up to events, trying to forestall the influence of jihadists who moved to fill in the vacuum while the United States did virtually nothing to assist the non-al-Qaeda elements of the Syrian opposition. Now, it is all a muddle, and trying to extract bad elements from less bad elements is a difficult task. Moreover, what have we got to offer the preferable elements within the opposition? The president has said we won’t give them arms. Once again, his indecision has allowed the situation (not merely the casualty toll) to worsen, leaving us with less leverage and fewer options.
And last, there is Iran.
The NY Post has a great story about two WW II pilots; one American, one German. Click here for interviews with the pilots.
On Dec. 20, 1943, a young American bomber pilot named Charlie Brown found himself somewhere over Germany, struggling to keep his plane aloft with just one of its four engines still working. They were returning from their first mission as a unit, the successful bombing of a German munitions factory. Of his crew members, one was dead and six wounded, and 2nd Lt. Brown was alone in his cockpit, the three unharmed men tending to the others. Brown’s B-17 had been attacked by 15 German planes and left for dead, and Brown himself had been knocked out in the assault, regaining consciousness in just enough time to pull the plane out of a near-fatal nose dive.
None of that was as shocking as the German pilot now suddenly to his right.
Brown thought he was hallucinating. He did that thing you see people do in movies: He closed his eyes and shook his head no. He looked, again, out the co-pilot’s window. Again, the lone German was still there, and now it was worse. He’d flown over to Brown’s left and was frantic: pointing, mouthing things that Brown couldn’t begin to comprehend, making these wild gestures, exaggerating his expressions like a cartoon character.
Brown, already in shock, was freshly shot through with fear. What was this guy up to?
He craned his neck and yelled back for his top gunner, screamed at him to get up in his turret and shoot this guy out of the sky. Before Brown’s gunner could squeeze off his first round, the German did something even weirder: He looked Brown in the eye and gave him a salute. Then he peeled away.
What just happened? That question would haunt Brown for more than 40 years, long after he married and left the service and resettled in Miami, long after he had expected the nightmares about the German to stop and just learned to live with them.
“A Higher Call,” the new book by Adam Makos with Larry Alexander, tells the incredible true story of these two pilots. Franz Stigler was 26 when he was conscripted into Hitler’s Luftwaffe in 1942, a former commercial airline pilot whose father and brother had both died while serving their country. Stigler had been assigned to Squadron 4 of the German air force, and was initially stationed in Libya. …
What the latest scam college administrators have for fleecing their customers? College Fix has the answer.
While many wealthy university presidents favor high taxes, many of them don’t pay taxes on their own income. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, half of the nation’s 50 highest-paid college presidents had their taxes paid for them by the universities they lead.
As a group, university presidents are generally outspoken advocates of tax-and-spend, big-government liberalism. That’s not surprising in light of the liberal bent of academia, as well as the fact that most large universities survive on tens or even hundreds of millions of government grants and federal aid dollars.
They want you to pay high taxes so that the government can pass the money to their institutions. But they don’t pay taxes out of their own pockets, despite their huge salaries.
“Among the 50 highest-paid private-college presidents in 2010, half led institutions that provided top executives with cash to cover taxes on bonuses and other benefits, a Chronicle analysis has found. This practice, known as “grossing up,” has fallen out of fashion at many publicly traded companies, where boards have decided the perk is simply not worth the shareholder outrage it can invite.” …
NY Times OpEd exposes another college fraud.
LAST month The Chronicle of Higher Education published a damning investigation of college athletes across the nation who were maintaining their eligibility by taking cheap, easy online courses from an obscure junior college.
In just 10 days, academically deficient players could earn three credits and an easy “A” from Western Oklahoma State College for courses like “Microcomputer Applications” (opening folders in Windows) or “Nutrition” (stating whether or not the students used vitamins). The Chronicle quoted one Big Ten academic adviser as saying, “You jump online, finish in a week and half, get your grade posted, and you’re bowl-eligible.”
On the face of it, this is another sad but familiar story of the big-money intercollegiate-athletics complex corrupting the ivory tower. But it also reveals a larger, more pervasive problem: there are no meaningful standards of academic quality in higher education. And the more colleges and universities move their courses online, the more severe the problem gets.
Much attention has been paid to for-profit colleges that offer degrees online while exploiting federal student-loan programs and saddling ill-prepared students with debt. But nearly all of the institutions caught up in the 10-day credit dodge exposed by The Chronicle were public, nonprofit institutions. And both the credit-givers, like Western Oklahoma, and the sports machines at the other end of the transaction, like FloridaStateUniversity, were doing nothing illegal. …