Former Congressman Paul Findley, writing on The Huffington Post, writes:
As Condoleezza Rice once said: “We have an Israel-centric foreign policy.” How true. . . .
This struck me as quite surprising, so I did a google and LEXIS search for this quote to get more context, but I couldn’t find it. Searching for “Rice” near “Israel-centric,” I found a Robert Novak column that said:
In private conversation, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has insisted that Hezbollah — not al Qaeda — is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization. How could that be, considering al Qaeda’s global record of mass carnage?
In truth, Hezbollah is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel’s standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. “Outside this fight (against Israel), we have done nothing,” Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s secretary general, said in a recent New York Times interview. Thus, Rice’s comments suggest that the U.S. war against terrorism, accused of being Iraq-centric, actually is Israel-centric.
But that surely can’t be it, since that’s Novak characterizing Rice’s attitude as being implicitly Israel-centric, and not a quote from Rice saying “We have an Israel-centric foreign policy.”
Can any readers help me out? If you have any pointer to a place where Rice said this, please e-mail me at volokh at law.ucla.edu.
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