McCain Should be Campaigning AGAINST Condoleezza Rice Not WITH Her

I find these rumors of a McCain/Rice ticket very disturbing. During her tenure as Secretary of State she has shown horrible judgement in dealing with terrorists.Rice has gone far to appease terror at every step. She has ignored both US and Israeli law by calling for Israel to divide Jerusalem, She has compared terrorist leaders to Martin Luther King. Its not surprising that one of the US's most vehement condemnations of Hamas occurred when Condi was on an airplane away from microphones.

Senator McCain is seen as someone who is pro-Israel and anti-terror. In order to establish himself as the candidate who will be best at defending the free world, he should be campaigning against Condoleezza Rice's policies. He Shouldn't by any means have her as a running mate:

Slow Suicide on Israeli Security: McCain Must Spell Out Differences with Bush/Rice Approach

Joel Himelfarb

While American political aficionados are fixating on everything from Bill Clinton’s tantrums on his wife’s behalf to Barack Obama’s appearance on The View, a volatile political/military situation has been building in Israel. That nation finds itself under mounting political siege from rogue regimes in Iran and Syria and their terrorist surrogates, who are becoming increasingly brazen in their violence. On Friday, a Hamas sniper based in Gaza tried to assassinate Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who was visiting the Israeli side of the border – where Israeli civilians have had their lives turned upside down by terrorist rocket and mortar attacks since Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza three years ago.The sniper missed Dichter, while hitting a senior aide to the minister with a bullet in the neck. (He is hospitalized in fair condition).The attack occurred as Dichter was briefing a group of Jewish and Christian visitors from Toronto.

Israel has refrained from launching the sort of large-scale military operation necessary to stop the terrorist fire from Gaza – at least partially in response to pressure for “restraint” from the United States. With President Bush getting ready to visit Israel next month as part of his quixotic campaign to achieve an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement before he leaves office, his administration is pressuring to take a softer approach to the terrorist threat from the West Bank as well. Last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice got Israel to remove security checkpoints that have proven critical to Israel’s ability to prevent mass-casualty attacks from the West Bank terrorists.

All of this could have large implications for the likely Republican presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, who needs to begin to publicly distance himself from the Bush/Rice approach toward Israel. This is particularly true with regard to placing pressure on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s weak Left-of-center Israeli government to make security concessions that will weaken Israel’s ability to prevent Palestinian terrorists from attacking it. If Israel experiences an upsurge in attacks, you can bet that Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton will try to sound like superhawks in arguing that the Jewish State has the right to defend itself. (All the better to camouflage their own McGovernite national-security views.) You can be absolutely certain that in such circumstances, Clinton and Obama will do everything possible to link McCain with the most questionable parts of the Bush State Department’s Middle East policy.

Given the short attention span of the American electorate, which less than two years ago voted to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House and Harry Reid Senate majority leader, the Arizona senator cannot take for granted that the voters will see through the phoniness and political spin. After all, such tactics have proven effective time and again in getting Democrats elected president in modern times. In 1960, John F. Kennedy (attacking Vice President Richard Nixon over a dubious “missile gap”), in 1976, Jimmy Carter (attacking President Ford from the right for being insufficiently tough on Communist human-rights violations in places like Poland) and Bill Clinton in 1992 (suggesting the first President Bush wasn’t tough enough on Communist China) all made use of these kinds of attacks on Republican administrations. All of these lines of attack were false and misleading to one degree or another – and all of them worked.

If McCain fails to spell out his differences with a badly flawed Bush/Rice approach, he’ll give the Democrats a golden opportunity to link him with a policy debacle in the making. McCain needs to start explaining now why this approach is wrong and what he would do differently. A good place to start would be to make it clear that he would not pressure Israel into questionable concessions that could jeopardize its security – like Rice’s successful effort last week to pressure Defense Minister Ehud Barak to get rid of security checkpoints that have helped dramatically reduce the ability of suicide bombers to infiltrate into Israel.

At one level, this is pathetic. Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, was a disaster as prime minister from 1999-2001. Israel’s chaotic unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon, ceding its northern border to the terrorist Hezbollah, was his doing. In July 2000, Barak at Camp David offered to withdraw virtually to the 1949 Armistice Line. Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat rejected the offer and went to war in September 2000. When Israelis went to the polls less than five months later, they had had enough, tossing Barak out of office and giving Likud opposition leader Ariel Sharon a 25-point landslide victory.

Following his humiliation by the voters, Barak went into the private sector and became a spectacularly wealthy man. Last year, he defeated Labor Party leader Amir Peretz in a primary to become head of the party once again. With his victory, Barak replaced Peretz as defense minister in the coalition government headed by Olmert.

Upon returning to government service, Barak has tried to reinvent himself as someone who could be counted upon to act decisively against terrorism. Last month, he appeared before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, pointing out how critical the West Bank security checkpoints are to the security of his country.

“Each removal of any roadblock is tantamount to gambling with Israelis’ lives,” Barak said. “No roadblock was positioned where it was without a very cogent reason. No roadblock is without clear security value. Each roadblock is there only because it’s necessitated by indisputable security contingencies.”

Nothing changed during the two-week period between Barak’s testimony and Rice’s visit to Israel on Monday, when Barak, responding to pressure from Washington and the Left wing of his own party, announced the removal of 50 of the roadblocks. As the Jerusalem Post pointed out the following day, it didn’t take long for the new approach to start showing results – bad ones. Within hours of the removal of one of the barriers, known as the Rimonim barricade, there was a terrorist attempt nearby to stab an Israeli; this time the terrorist was shot by a would-be victim.

Desperation efforts to risk Israeli civilians’ security in order to help the sclerotic Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas fight Hamas don’t work. Five years ago, Israel removed the same Rimonim barrier, but had to put it back up after several Israelis were murdered by terrorists. For the Israel Defense Force and many civilians living on the Israeli side of the Green Line, the feeling is that roadblocks removed by Barak “have triggered a time-bomb,” the Post noted. “The only question remaining is whose lives will be lost as a result.”

To the extent that this is the product of purely domestic Israeli political considerations, that’s something for Israelis to decide – not Americans. The problem here is that Bush and Rice are effectively weighing in on behalf of the Israeli Left by pressuring Israel to do this. If John McCain does not make clear that he opposes such foolishness, then he is making a potentially catastrophic mistake.

Joel Himelfarb is an editorial writer for The Washington Times. The views expressed here are his own.