This is posted in the interest of documenting a principled resignation from this administration. Kindly recall that the meme during the Clinton administration to rival "Oh what will we tell the Children?" was this: "Where oh where are the principled resignations. Well here's a telling one reported in Salon by Sidney Blumenthal:
The story of Rice's role in the destruction of the Middle East peace process has never been told. Yet it is impossible to understand the far-reaching impact of her ineptitude on the general crisis engulfing U.S. foreign policy without knowing of her previously undisclosed actions in a secretive administration. The pattern of her conduct and the president's on the Middle East is of a piece with the carefully arranged disregard of terrorism despite all warnings before 9/11.
<snip>
In January 2002, Rice launched a serious effort to restart the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians. She hired Flynt Leverett, who was a professional foreign service officer on the policy planning staff of the State Department, as director of the initiative on the National Security Council. Rice told him and those assigned to work with him that she understood that the absence of peace process was hurting the war on terrorism and that Leverett should propose any and all measures he thought necessary, regardless of potential political controversy. "She told us we should go for the long bomb, using a football metaphor," Leverett recalled to me.
<snip>
Rice had crumbled in the face of internal political opposition from the neoconservative armada. "In the end, the neoconservatives in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, plus Karl Rove's political shop, prevailed," Leverett told me. The American Jewish lobby was less a factor than the religious right of Christian Zionists, an electoral bloc in Bush's base, represented internally by Rove. Rove emerges not simply as a fixer or tactician, but as a foreign policy decision-maker aligned with the neocons by means of this connection.
It gets worse...
By November, the road map was ready to be publicly released. But Sharon opposed it, claiming that proposing it would amount to interference in the upcoming Israeli election. Leverett argued to Rice: "We had promised to put it out to everyone. If we pull it now we reverse a commitment and would be intervening in Israeli politics in another way. That argument was not appreciated by Condi. So they didn't put out the road map." It was only under pressure from Prime Minister Tony Blair, as a precondition to his alliance on the eve of the Iraq invasion, that Bush at last announced the road map on March 14, 2003.
The folowing observation characterizes the Rice testimony today as though it was made in responsee to it:
The story of the Middle East debacle, like that of the pre-9/11 terrorism fiasco, reveals the inner workings of Bush's White House: The president, aggressive and manipulated, ignorant of his own policies and their consequences, negligent; the secretary of state, prideful, a man of misplaced gratitude, constantly in retreat; the vice president as Richelieu, secretive, conniving, at the head of a neoconservative cabal, the power behind the throne; the national security advisor, seemingly open and even vulnerable, posing as the honest broker, but deceitful and derelict, an underhanded lightweight.
<snip>
So Leverett decided he must quit. "When they wouldn't put the road map out in 2002 and brought in someone like Abrams, that meant they weren't going to be serious. I didn't want to stick around for a charade. I say this as someone who voted for Bush in 2000 and was genuinely committed to see him succeed."
Ah yes, the warrior princess who has god and George Bush as her....
There are other resignations that aren't high profile either: U.S. terrorism policy spawns steady staff exodus