🚀 go-pugleaf

bearclaw@cruller.invalid wrote:

>I _must_ be dense, right? What was Condi talking about?
>
>Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared critics of the Iraq war to 
>Northerners who sought peace with the South during the Civil War. 
>"There were people who thought the Declaration of Independence was a 
>mistake," she said.

No wonder it sounds confusing.  You have conflated one quote against
another.

More accurately:

quote-
Rice then offered a parallel between critics of the administration's
Iraq policies and "people who thought it was a mistake to fight the
Civil War (in this country) to its end and to insist that the
emancipation of slaves would hold."

"I'm sure that there were people who said, "why don't we get out of
this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with
slaves."

continuing...

Rice, a former academic, said she spent the summer reading biographies
of the Founding Fathers and said she was certain "there were people
who thought the Declaration of Independence was a mistake" as well.

-close quote

In the first case, she is referring to copperheads.  These were
northerners who had some sympathies with the south.  After a few
battles, there weren't as many of these, and those who remained were
shunned or silenced.  As you probably know, the civil war wasn't as
much about slavery as the power of the central government, an issue
which had been unresolved, or at least untested,  since the
revolutionary war.  

As for the second quote "there were people who thought the Declaration
of Independence was a mistake"  That was much earlier, and the people
who felt that way (tories and loyalists) were often forcibly driven
out of the country, with a lot of them ending up in Canada and other
more stable parts of the British empire.

There are always people who will oppose a war.  Sometimes they are
wrong.  In the summer of 1940 German troops occupied Paris, and
Marshal Philippe Petain became the head of the French government,
suing for peace. Gertrude Stein soon translated Petain's speeches and
hailed him as a hero of the French nation.

Hemingway lauded the fight against the fascists in Spain, who were
more accurately fighting a communist takeover of the country.
Remember that Hemingway was also kissie kissie with Castro.

You might read more history.