Condoleezza Rice

Thursday, November 18, 2004


Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next U.S. secretary
of state, the whole world seems to be noticing that President George W. 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 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 regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
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 Americans 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. Rice was either ignoring facts that were right in front of her,
unable to screen out the bad intelligence, or deliberately misleading the
American people. 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 Americans and the world.

As secretary of state, Rice is going to be first and foremost a loyal
servant of 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 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 Rice surrounds herself
with ideologues who adopt 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.

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, 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 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 Rice could do for the United States, the world and
Bush's legacy 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 Yasser Arafat. If Bush could do
what President 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 Rice would have proved beyond argument that she deserved
the president's - and the American people's - trust because of qualities far
more important than knee-jerk loyalty.





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