{"id":281,"date":"2007-04-26T09:14:25","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T14:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=281"},"modified":"2007-04-26T09:14:25","modified_gmt":"2007-04-26T14:14:25","slug":"is-rice-really-nice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=281","title":{"rendered":"Is Rice Really Nice?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><meta http-equiv=\"Content-Language\" content=\"en-us\" \/> <meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=windows-1252\" \/><title>In a recent post on Cheney<\/title>In <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=273\">a recent post<\/a> on  Cheney, Iran, and the whole &#8220;British hostage&#8221; affair, I asked whether Cheney  might not have sabotaged an Iranian-American <em>quid pro quo<\/em> that would have  involved the release, by the United States, of the &#8220;Irbil Five&#8221;&#8211;Iranians held  by the US in Iraq.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>At first glance, the whole hostage affair seems to represent a loss for  \tCheney.<\/p>\n<p>And he may, indeed, agree with Bolton that the whole deal was a victory for  \tIranian hardliners.<\/p>\n<p>It is also possible, however, that Cheney is not quite finished.<\/p>\n<p>The British have been release. But the Iranian \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Irbil Five\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?<\/p>\n<p>No sign of them. At least not yet&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Is it possible that those are Cheney fingerprints on \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the realpolitik of  \ttoday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Iraq\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That was April 11th.<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, Michael Ledeen <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aei.org\/publications\/filter.all,pubID.26030\/pub_detail.asp\"> offered up some gossip<\/a> that appears to confirm these suspicions, beginning  with Ledeen&#8217;s discussion of a news story by Robin Wright in the <em>Washington  Post<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[A] story written&#8230; by one of Secretary Rice&#8217;s favorite journalists,  \tRobin Wright of the Washington Post&#8230; said:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>After intense internal debate, the Bush administration has decided to  \t\thold on to five Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence agents (sic)  \t\tcaptured in Iraq, overruling a State Department recommendation to  \t\trelease them, according to U.S. officials.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been told that &#8220;intense internal debate&#8221; is exactly right&#8211;it was <strong> \tone of the most contentious debates in quite a while<\/strong>. <strong>Wright reports  \tthat Vice President Cheney led the charge against Rice&#8217;s position, and I am  \ttold that Secretary of Defense Gates was equally adamant. <\/strong>This is  \treinforced by a statement by General Petraeus, to the effect that we  \tintended to keep them and keep interrogating them as long as we had food and  \tthey had things to say. Moreover, I am told that the intensity of the debate  \twas due to the fact that Rice was not merely recommending the release of the  \tIranians, but had informed the mullahs that we would release them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>On the Iranian front, then, it certainly looks like Cheney <em>and <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=230\">Gates<\/a><\/em> leading the  hawkish faction with Rice working to open diplomatic avenues.<\/p>\n<p>The mystery here is Rice.\u00c2\u00a0 In an April 22, 2006 analysis, the <em> Financial Times<\/em> (subscription required) suggested that Rice was looking  increasingly &#8220;realist&#8221; in her positions.<\/p>\n<p>To judge from Ledeen&#8217;s anger (and <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=88\">Perle&#8217;s earlier accusations<\/a>),  one could imagine that Rice is something less than a Neocon &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=144\">true  believer<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And yet&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The record is uneven, <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=268\"> even on Iran<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 On the <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=280\">Palestinian Authority<\/a>  and <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=109\">Lebanon<\/a>?\u00c2\u00a0  Rice looks pretty hawkish.<\/p>\n<p>And then there is <a href=\"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/?p=204\">Rice  on Russia<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 On missile systems in Europe, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/04\/26\/world\/europe\/26cnd-Rice.html?_r=1&#038;hp&#038;oref=slogin\"> Rice doesn&#8217;t appear particularly dovish<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps there is an underlying logic to all this, but it escapes me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent post on CheneyIn a recent post on Cheney, Iran, and the whole &#8220;British hostage&#8221; affair, I asked whether Cheney might not have sabotaged an Iranian-American quid pro quo that would have involved the release, by the United States, of the &#8220;Irbil Five&#8221;&#8211;Iranians held by the US in Iraq. At first glance, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,3,12,31,10,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/profcutler.com\/wordpress_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}