"The heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad from where the American administration indirectly administers most things in Iraq seems to have caught the fancy of the Administration in Washington — which seems to be repeating in the rest of the Middle East the isolation from its surroundings that it practises in Iraq. This is evident in this week's trip to the region by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who appears to be pursuing a fanciful strategy based on unrealistic American hopes rather than actual realities in the region.
Being clueless about Middle Eastern realities has been an occasional American official hazard; making this a chronic recurrence and operating procedure seems really stupid. Rice and American diplomacy fail to grasp a central point about US policies in the Middle East. Many of the problems she says she wants to solve are usually exacerbated by American policies, especially Washington's extreme support for Israel rather than being even-handed in the Arab-Israeli conflict."
So writes Rami Khouri - director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Daily Star, Beirut - in this op-ed piece in The Age here.
Being clueless about Middle Eastern realities has been an occasional American official hazard; making this a chronic recurrence and operating procedure seems really stupid. Rice and American diplomacy fail to grasp a central point about US policies in the Middle East. Many of the problems she says she wants to solve are usually exacerbated by American policies, especially Washington's extreme support for Israel rather than being even-handed in the Arab-Israeli conflict."
So writes Rami Khouri - director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Daily Star, Beirut - in this op-ed piece in The Age here.
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