The Friends of George
The Friends of George
Published: November 17, 2004
Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next secretary of state, the whole world seems to be noticing that George Bush is stuffing his second-term cabinet with yes men and women. It's worrisome, although when the president did have dissident voices in the top tier of his administration, he did a very thorough job of ignoring them. Optimists can regard the new team as a more efficient packaging of the status quo.
Our concern about Ms. Rice is not that she makes the president feel comfortable. It's that as national security adviser, she seemed to tell him what he wanted to hear about decisions he'd already made, rather than what he needed to know to make sound judgments in the first place.
That was particularly true when it came to the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ms. Rice, who appeared so often on the Sunday morning talk shows and even on the campaign trail that she sometimes seemed more like a press secretary than a national security adviser, was the one who told the country that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. And she ominously warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Her staff knew that the evidence behind those claims was extremely dubious, at best. Ms. Rice was either ignoring facts that were right in front of her, unable to screen out the bad intelligence, or deliberately misleading the nation. In any case, she failed in her duty to keep the president from seizing upon the same unreliable intelligence to defend his policy of preventive war with Iraq before the American public and the world.
As secretary of state, Ms. Rice is going to be first and foremost a loyal servant of Mr. Bush's agenda and worldview, and that does not bode well for those who were hoping for a more nuanced approach to American diplomacy. Much more worrisome is where the people around her and directly under her will be getting their marching orders. Stephen Hadley, who will become national security adviser after four years as Ms. Rice's loyal second, has ties to Vice President Dick Cheney, as do other officials who have been mentioned for possible top jobs at the State Department. If Ms. Rice surrounds herself with ideologues who adopt Mr. Cheney's my-way-or-the-highway attitude toward the rest of the world, she'll be undermining herself and the United States' national interests from Day 1.
Ms. Rice, a former academic, has no real background in managing a vast bureaucracy or in hands-on diplomacy. But she has other attributes that could serve her well in her new job. Unlike Colin Powell, Ms. Rice seems willing to travel constantly. That's a critical requirement for a secretary of state. Diplomacy is a world of formal positions and personal relationships - breakthroughs almost always occur when players at the highest level meet face to face. And when Ms. Rice negotiates in her new job, she will not only have an exalted title, but will also have all the power that comes from having the president's trust and attention.
The greatest service Ms. Rice could do for the nation, the world and the legacy of President Bush would be to focus her considerable energies on encouraging a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. This is the real key to long-term stability in the Middle East, and opportunities to achieve it have opened up with the death of Yasir Arafat. If Mr. Bush could manage to do what Bill Clinton tried so hard to do, but failed, it could be an achievement that would overshadow many of the foreign policy disasters of the first term. And Ms. Rice would have proved beyond argument that she deserved the president's - and the nation's - trust because of qualities far more important than knee-jerk loyalty.
Also worth reading:
The Bush Revolution
The truth about Colin Powell
Questions for Rice
Published: November 17, 2004
Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next secretary of state, the whole world seems to be noticing that George Bush is stuffing his second-term cabinet with yes men and women. It's worrisome, although when the president did have dissident voices in the top tier of his administration, he did a very thorough job of ignoring them. Optimists can regard the new team as a more efficient packaging of the status quo.
Our concern about Ms. Rice is not that she makes the president feel comfortable. It's that as national security adviser, she seemed to tell him what he wanted to hear about decisions he'd already made, rather than what he needed to know to make sound judgments in the first place.
That was particularly true when it came to the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ms. Rice, who appeared so often on the Sunday morning talk shows and even on the campaign trail that she sometimes seemed more like a press secretary than a national security adviser, was the one who told the country that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing nuclear weapons. And she ominously warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Her staff knew that the evidence behind those claims was extremely dubious, at best. Ms. Rice was either ignoring facts that were right in front of her, unable to screen out the bad intelligence, or deliberately misleading the nation. In any case, she failed in her duty to keep the president from seizing upon the same unreliable intelligence to defend his policy of preventive war with Iraq before the American public and the world.
As secretary of state, Ms. Rice is going to be first and foremost a loyal servant of Mr. Bush's agenda and worldview, and that does not bode well for those who were hoping for a more nuanced approach to American diplomacy. Much more worrisome is where the people around her and directly under her will be getting their marching orders. Stephen Hadley, who will become national security adviser after four years as Ms. Rice's loyal second, has ties to Vice President Dick Cheney, as do other officials who have been mentioned for possible top jobs at the State Department. If Ms. Rice surrounds herself with ideologues who adopt Mr. Cheney's my-way-or-the-highway attitude toward the rest of the world, she'll be undermining herself and the United States' national interests from Day 1.
Ms. Rice, a former academic, has no real background in managing a vast bureaucracy or in hands-on diplomacy. But she has other attributes that could serve her well in her new job. Unlike Colin Powell, Ms. Rice seems willing to travel constantly. That's a critical requirement for a secretary of state. Diplomacy is a world of formal positions and personal relationships - breakthroughs almost always occur when players at the highest level meet face to face. And when Ms. Rice negotiates in her new job, she will not only have an exalted title, but will also have all the power that comes from having the president's trust and attention.
The greatest service Ms. Rice could do for the nation, the world and the legacy of President Bush would be to focus her considerable energies on encouraging a permanent peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. This is the real key to long-term stability in the Middle East, and opportunities to achieve it have opened up with the death of Yasir Arafat. If Mr. Bush could manage to do what Bill Clinton tried so hard to do, but failed, it could be an achievement that would overshadow many of the foreign policy disasters of the first term. And Ms. Rice would have proved beyond argument that she deserved the president's - and the nation's - trust because of qualities far more important than knee-jerk loyalty.
Also worth reading:
The Bush Revolution
The truth about Colin Powell
Questions for Rice
posted by Pamela J. Leavey at 11:20 PM
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