Pat Buchanan corrects Condoleeza's history of the Middle East.

Pat also invokes the Victor Buono principle against Condi (and Bushee) and that Arab democracy thing because even hizbollah could win an election.

So remember Miss Rice: "What you don't know can hurt you a whole lot".

Rice declared:

For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course.

What is it about Rice's speech that makes it so off-putting and irritating?
First, in treating friends, common decency and diplomacy – and the Good Book, as well – teach us that private admonition is preferable to the public declamation, which is often the mark of the hypocrite.

Second, Rice's public scolding fairly reeks of moral arrogance. Unlike my purblind predecessors, Rice is telling us, my president and I are moved by a higher, nobler cause. While we fight for democracy for Arabs and Muslims, my predecessors, going back to World War II, were only interested in "stability." Thus, they all failed.

The claim is absurd. For Rice's predecessors had to conduct foreign policy during a Cold War in which freedom was at stake and under siege from the greatest enemy the West had known since the Islamic armies invaded France in the eighth century.

Pat definitely scored with that one.

Thirty years ago, during Watergate, Richard Nixon ordered a huge arms airlift to save Israel in the Yom Kippur War, for which Golda Meir was eternally grateful. Then, with Dr. Kissinger, he brokered an armistice and effected a severance of Sadat's Egypt from the Soviet Bloc – to the West. Jimmy Carter took it from there, brokering the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel that still hold.

Does Rice believe that because Nixon, Kissinger and Carter did not insist that Sadat hold elections they were on some lesser moral plane than her own virtuous self?

President Bush's father, in the Gulf War, put together a coalition of NATO nations and Arab autocracies, including the Syria of Hafez al-Assad – a ruler no less ruthless than Saddam – to expel Iraq from Kuwait in a six-week war that was a military masterpiece. U.S. casualties were a tenth of those in our current war, an end to which is not remotely in sight.

Was that Bush I achievement diminished because Saudi Arabia, which provided bases and troops, and Kuwait, the nation we rescued, were, neither of them, democracies on the New England model?

From Truman to Bush I, from Acheson to Jim Baker, with rare exceptions, U.S. Middle East policy was crafted, as it should have been, to secure the vital interests of the United States. Who is Rice, and what exactly are her accomplishments, to demean what these men achieved: victory in a half-century Cold War with the Soviet Empire?
(Thanks to WorldNetDaily.)