[middle-east] condi off to see what she can do

Off to the woods - have to relax once in a while

Sergey Strokan, at Russian Kommersant, mentions Condi’s current visit to the Middle-East, to check that the torture’s going along nicely … er … to broker peace in the region. He says that whoever controls the Middle East controls the world and Rice is going to find out about it from the Arabs, after trying to find the key to Iran in Russia, China and Europe, without success. The secret in the region is that hidden competition has defined relations between the Persians and the Arabs for many centuries and that the spirit of competition still wafts through their relations. The U.S. can play on that, if it has sufficient diplomatic skills. The Middle-East was chosen by the Bush administration’s backers as the main testing ground for advancing its model of the new world order, which could subsequently be used in other areas of the world. Putin wrily commented that we don't need “democracy like they have in Iraq”.