I listened to parts of the Senate hearing Tuesday on the nomination of Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state. She faced some tough questions, and deservedly so– especially about the Bush administration’s half-hearted support for democracy in “friendly” authoritarian countries, and about the failures in post-invasion Iraq.
But I appreciated her comparison of the progress toward democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq with that in the early days of the United States: “So far I have not seen the Iraqis or for that matter the Afghans make compromises as bad as the one in 1789 that declared my ancestors to be three-fifths of a man.”
(See the US Constitution, Article I, Section 2, Clause 3.)
