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Posted on 11/14/2011 6:25:31 PM PST by george76
Many ethnic Armenians who read ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recently published memoirs ...are spitting fire over her descriptions of her battles with the US-based Diaspora Armenian lobby.
Both in 1991 as a presidential aide (to then US President George Bush) and in 2007 as secretary of state (under then President George W. Bush), Rice worked to defeat the congressional push for recognizing the World-War I-era slaughter of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.
...
Sassounian charged that Rice had behaved as "a spineless official of a banana republic" by allegedly caving in to Turkish interests.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It's not fair. They should demand the whole crowd be condemned for the Armenian massacre ~ all of them!
Otherwise it looks like ethnic hate rather than a cry for justice.
I hope he and Condi got whatever it was they wanted in exchange for compromising the nation's integrity.
It might be possible to justify the refusal to back the Armenian effort by saying that offending the Turks was not in our national interest. Turkey was our ally in defending the West against the Soviet Union and the Communist threat, and continued to be our ally right up to the time that Bush came into office.
But unfortunately it was during Bush’s and Condi’s watch that Turkey went over from being our ally to being our enemy. Whatever their intentions may have been, it sure didn’t work. Turkey went from being the most secular of the majority-Muslim nations to being just another Islamic state. The Generals caved in to the extremists, and they are no longer able to control the situation. The age of Attaturk is dead.
I am not sure this is “Bush’s Fault”. What happened in Turkey had been percolating for some time. It was just coincidental, in my opinion.
That said, I am not at all a fan of the second term Bush foreign policy, and Cheney’s recent book really cemented that for me.
Well, heck. Colin Powell was trying to stab the White House in the back, and only ended up hitting Scooter Libby. I guess it is just the State Department...everything it touches turns to crap.
Just look at what the SD did in the Balkans, an utter disaster.
In following the story of the rise of Attaturk, I was appraised of his efforts to bring Turkey into the 20th century. His edict against the wearing of the fez and beards was remarkable. In speaking about the men who died at Gallipoli, he refered to both Turkish soliers and the allied troops. These were Australians, New Zealanders and British. "They are all our sons" he said.
I reminded by history of the defeat of the British,at Kut el Amara (Iraq). 1916 saw 13,000 surrendered troops marched off by the Turks. 70% British died and 50% Indian allies died.
Gentlemen, we have a problem.
Well, I suspect that a good deal of the blame should go to France. They had a very cozy oil-for-food deal with Saddam that they didn’t want to lose. And they have always made nice with Muslims, hoping to increase their influence and trade around the Mediterranean. I strongly suspect that Chirac told the Generals that he’d support Turkey’s admittance into the EU if they blocked Bush’s plans to go into Iraq through Turkey.
And then he double-crossed them.
I also agree that maybe Bush couldn’t have stopped that regretable change in Turkey’s orientation, back toward Islam. But at the very least, he certainly let himself get snookered.
I can remember reading intel reports back in the 70s about the ASALA (The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia). They were very active, carrying on a guerilla war against Turkey, bombing Turkish embassies and interests abroad and in Turkey itself. They fell apart when the USSR did, and Armenia became a free country.
Bush trusted the opinions of the people he had selected to work with him. In the case of Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, I am inclined to think he was wise to do so.
In the case of Rice, Powell and Rove...not so much. He took advice he shouldn’t have, and made some political calculations that damaged him and his agenda. I thought Bush did best when he took a consistent stand on something.
The French...well. Yeah. I am with you on that. They really pissed me off back then, before we went in, all the way back to the first Gulf War.
The State Department, since the 1930s, and likely back to WWI, has been infested with liberals. That pretty much says it all.
I agree with snookered.
Not just liberals but outright communists.
And it touches way too much.
ASALA was never anything but a bunch of Soviet stooge Communist thugs. They didn’t want Armenian independence; they wanted to annex western Turkey to the USSR.
I didn’t know that. I guess it makes sense. I grew up on a street in Detroit where there were quite a few Armenian families, so I’ve always had an affinity for them.
I'm sort of the same way. I worshiped in Armenian churches one summer when I was still searching.
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