It’s been about a year since Condoleezza Rice was hired to the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, the body that will decide which four teams will play for the National Champion game in January. Granted, the Bowl Championship Series was an atrocious system, but the committee, who thought it reasonable to hire Rice, will probably be just as ridiculous. Mainly because it hired Rice.
Knowledgable about the game though she may be, that doesn’t excuse Rice from the wake of questionable foreign policy decisions she left behind. Let’s not forget that Rice was National Security Advisor and the U.S. Secretary of State for President George W. Bush, and part of the team that orchestrated the Iraq War debacle.
The lies of Rice and her war party of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell, have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. From 2003 to 2011, deaths caused directly and indirectly by the war were 405,000. The shocking thing is that those aren’t even military deaths but deaths of Iraqi civilians.
According to a PLOS Medicine survey reported on by National Geographic, 60 percent of the “excess deaths of men, women, and children . . . were the direct result of shootings, bombings, airstrikes, or other violence.” Alongside those casualties, 56,000 death occurred from people displaced from their homes trying to leave Iraq, and the rest died of heart attacks or ruined living situations.
The administration reportedly downplayed the total Iraqi casualties in 2005 saying that only 30,000 Iraqis have died from American occupation. That estimate is a modest contrast to the 405,000 deaths noted by the survey, equaling 50,000 per year. There have been over 50,000 American casualties in the Middle East since 2001.
Why Rice would be elected to this committee is more than a mere head scratcher. It almost drives one to the point of having an aneurysm. There is one upside here, however. At least Rice’s decisions won’t lead to any deaths. We hope, at least.
