Anti Susan Rice thread

[zerozero]

 

[zerozero]

The Controversial Africa Policy of Susan Rice - Armin Rosen - The Atlantic

For some, Rice embodies a period in American policy in which U.S. influence was not put to particularly effective use in Africa. Rice served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during Bill Clinton's second term as president. As Rosenblum explained in a 2002 article in Current History [$], the second Clinton administration began with a full-fledged pivot to Africa, with Madeline Albright undertaking a high-profile visit to the continent early in her tenure as secretary of state. It was a substantive trip -- Albright gathered some of Africa's most dynamic newly-installed heads of state in Entebbe and Addis Ababa, where she articulated America's intention to change its relationship with the continent.

But Rosenblum explains that this approach meant embracing now-problematic leaders like Rwanda's Paul Kagame, Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, and, to a lesser extent, DRC's Laurent Kabila and Eritrea's Isais Afewerki. Under Clinton's Africa policy, these leaders -- all of whom were former rebels who had taken power through violent means -- would serve as a vanguard for the social and political transformation of the continent. Above all, they would be treated as normal allies of the United States, regarded as equal partners and autonomous actors, rather than countries that were only important insomuch as they could be exploited or ignored. Redefining and strengthening Washington's relationship to Africa was a laudable aim that arguably presaged the much greater degree of engagement that followed under George W. Bush and Obama.

Yet Rosenblum believes Rice helped usher in a policy that counted very few successes, even if he says that he has been "very impressed" with her tenure as UN ambassador. "Rice was a major force in this new, very personalized engagement with a group of leaders who had come to power through military means but who represented, for the Clinton policy people, something new and admirable," he says. "The group they bonded to included leaders who were eventually at war with each other within a period of two or three years." By the end of Clinton's presidency, Afewerki and Zenawi had fought a war that killed between 70,000 and 100,000 people; Kagame and Museveni fought Kabila in the eastern DRC, and then turned their guns on each other. Many, including the author and former U.N. investigator Jason Stearns, believe that Clinton's policy enabled both Rwandan and Ugandan adventurism in Eastern Congo, prolonging a conflict that still reverberates.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs...-problem-with-a-secretary-of-state-susan-rice

Since she left the Clinton administration, Rice has not publicly opposed any U.S. military intervention, unless you count her support for ending the war in Iraq while campaigning for Obama or her recent statements explaining the administration's reluctance to use force Syria. Otherwise, she has vocally supported some proposed interventions and been quiet about others. (It's possible my review missed an anti-war statement somewhere, but if so, it was not something she much repeated).

During the Bush administration, Rice, then at the Brookings Institution, was a leading advocate for intervening in Sudan's civil war to protect civilians in the rebellious Darfur region. She suggested bombing various targets, an international peace-keeping force, and a naval blockade. She cited the bombing of Kosovo as an example of how U.S. and allied forces could intervene even without U.N. Security authorization, in contravention of international law. ...

Subsequently, Rice criticized the conduct of the occupation but not the decision to invade. She became an advocate of nation-building in failed states. She took the standard Democratic hawk view on Iran: negotiate but threaten war to prevent nuclear weapons development. As Obama's campaign surrogate, she backed increasing troop levels in Afghanistan, and, in office, she defended the troop surge he implemented there.

And, of course, as U.N. ambassador, Rice was a leading force behind the U.S. intervention in Libya, which the administration justified through a series of arguments that bore little scrutiny then and have aged poorly. Contrary to the administration's claims, there was little indication of impending mass slaughter in Benghazi in early 2011. White House claims that military intervention would help make Libya a liberal country offend what we know about the sources of liberalism and seem even more dubious given conditions there today. Events in Syria and elsewhere have made a mockery of Rice and the administration's argument that bombing Libya would allow democratic revolutions in nearby countries to proceed without repression....

To be fair, Rice's opinions on all these matters are little different from most Democratic foreign-policy elites, including most of the other people advising Obama about wars. Their Republican counterparts differ only in having less use for multilateralism and being somewhat more belligerent. A small irony here is that, substantively, McCain and Rice differ little on these wars, probably less than he and Sen. John Kerry, who is also a rumored to be in the running for secretary of state. Rice is just a notably successful exemplar of a foreign policy community where supporting war is generally better for one's career than opposing it.

 

[zerozero]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/susan-rice-and-africas-despots.html?_r=0

Critics, including Howard W. French, a former correspondent for The New York Times, say that in the late 1990s, Ms. Rice tacitly approved of an invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo that was orchestrated by Mr. Kagame of Rwanda and supported by Mr. Museveni of Uganda. In The New York Review of Books in 2009, Mr. French reported that witnesses had heard Ms. Rice describe the two men as the best insurance against genocide in the region. “They know how to deal with that,” he reported her as having said. “The only thing we have to do is look the other way.” Ms. Rice has denied supporting the invasion.

More recently, according to Jason K. Stearns, a scholar of the region, Ms. Rice temporarily blocked a United Nations report documenting Rwanda’s support for the M23 rebel group now operating in eastern Congo, and later moved to delete language critical of Rwanda and Uganda from a Security Council resolution. “According to former colleagues, she feels that more can be achieved by constructive engagement, not public censure,” Mr. Stearns wrote recently on Foreign Policy’s Web site.
...
In fairness, in her eulogy, Ms. Rice said she differed with Mr. Meles on questions like democracy and human rights. But if so, the message did not get through; under Mr. Meles during the past 15 years, democracy and the rule of law in Ethiopia steadily deteriorated. Ethiopia imprisoned dissidents and journalists, used food aid as a political tool, appropriated vast sections of land from its citizens and prevented the United Nations from demarcating its border with Eritrea.

Meanwhile, across multiple administrations, the United States has favored Ethiopia as an ally and a perceived bulwark against extremism in the region. In 2012 the nation received $580 million in American foreign aid.

Eritrea is no innocent. It has closed itself off, stifled dissent and forced its young people to choose between endless military service at home and seeking asylum abroad. But I believe that the Security Council, with Ms. Rice’s support, went too far in imposing sanctions on Eritrea in 2009 for supporting extremists.

President Obama has visited sub-Saharan Africa just once in his first term — a brief stop in Ghana. One signal that he plans to focus more on Africa — and on human rights and democracy, not only economic development and geopolitics — in his next term would be to nominate someone other than Susan Rice as America’s top diplomat.

 

[theworldismine13]

#teamrice

 

[CASHAPP]

Yall bandwagon motherfukkers see what you did now.....

EXCLUSIVE: Susan Rice drops out of running for secretary of state; saddened by partisan politics - Rock Center with Brian Williams

 

[zerozero]

 

[zerozero]

look what I wasted my special wish fulfillment moment on

I should have posted about winning a million dollars or dating Jessica Alba

 

[Dirty Mcdrawz]

why didn't you want her to get sec. of state @zerozero ?

 

[zerozero]

she's too hawkish. She figured she screwed up in Rwanda so after that she supported Rwandan leaders too much while they were committing atrocities against other people. Plus Libya and other wars... she's too interested in getting into invasions for my taste

and her personal style is not going to win fans I think when she's out on the road trying to get things done

(also I'm not too sure of this but I think if you examine her career it's like bureaucratic climbing, just playing it safe)

 

[theworldismine13]

why didn't you want her to get sec. of state @zerozero ?

cuz she isnt a nice person like obama and clinton, susan rice would have been checking fools left and right, she's too real