This morning on This Week with George Stephanopoulos (ABC), Condoleezza Rice, interviewed on the violence in the Middle East:

Rice, awkwardly trying to justify the administration’s non-support of a cease-fire, stays with the Bush-Cheney fantasy line that “extremists” facing “a new Middle East” are the cause and source of the violence. (No mention of repressive regimes or the mistreatment of Palestine.)

Her reasoning is the neocon argument that past peace-keeping efforts in the past didn’t “work” –i.e. since no peace lasted forever, lives saved or quality of life improved in the interim don’t matter a whiff.

No time for obvious fallacies right now; this blog just to highlight a statement worthy of thought: Rice, winding up her peroration, asks rhetorically, “Where do we think Hezbollah and Hamas [etc] came from?”

Bingo. Those “extremists” — and this is the point that Bush-Cheney ALWAYS mask — are people, and they come from populations. Populations revolt when life becomes untenable. 

BTW, it is beside the point to accuse Bush-Cheney of being the “extremists,” and false to call them “radical” — a term meaning etymologically rooted, to the root, fundamental. That’s the last thing they are. They’re a cabal. This is the geopolitics of corruption and cabal at work, aggrandizing violence by every feasible means (not too overt) and at every level.

Re that last point: 1) Bill Kristol calls for war with Iran in today’s Weekly Standard, the paid-propaganda organ of the neocons; Fareed Zakharia made a good point dismissing the editorial, and even George F. Will demurred. 2) Weapons used in some horrific shootings in D.C. last week were brought back from Iraq and sold here at home. There will be more of that, to be sure, if this administration has its way.

Right now the president and Mrs. Bush are traveling around the country trying to sound nice. But there is only too much reason to fear that when fall 2006 elections are safely past, the administration will manage to achieve the major it wants against Iran, either directly or through Israel.

Meanwhile, the untruthful Condoleezza Rice, Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney have helped to bring about the deaths of thousands of little girls in Iraq. They support a foreign policy that is itself war crime — the immoral, illegal and unconstitutional invasion and occupation of another country.