Rice's Cease-Fire Theater

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears to be angling for a cease-fire in Gaza. Don't be fooled. This is the same play she staged during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, talking about the importance of a cease-fire without actually pressuring Israel into one--until the military assault was spent.

Why isn't President Bush doing what Ronald Reagan did in a similar situation? Reagan literally picked up the phone on Aug. 12, 1982, when Israel was mercilessly pounding Beirut in the climax of its invasion, and demanded that Prime Minister Menahem Begin end the assault. After avoiding his calls for half the day, Begin finally talked to the president and ceased fire. But Bush, as always, is delegating leadership to Rice, who has no real power, while Bush appears to be delaying any moral reflections to his retirement in Dallas.

Media Bloodhound's Brad Jacobson writes a trenchant analysis of the Bush administration's thinking through the prism of a couple of State Department press briefings and how they played out in the Associated Press' rendering:

During Monday's State Department press briefing, Associated Press State Department Correspondent Matthew Lee posed the most pointed question about the conflict in Gaza and the Bush administration's position: "What’s wrong with an immediate cease-fire that doesn’t have to be sustainable and durable if, during the pause that you get from an immediate cease-fire, something longer-term can be negotiated?" Lee didn't tread lightly either when Deputy Secretary of State Sean McCormack failed to provide a sufficient answer and continued to challenge McCormack on the same point in Tuesday's press briefing.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to print: the substance of these exchanges never made it into Lee's corresponding articles.