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Is Condoleezza Going To Stop Smiling?
(Peter Beaumont, The Observer, April 4, 2004)
This week President Bush's National Security Adviser, and his most trusted aide, will be grilled on why she failed to warn her government about the attacks of 11 September. . . . Between games of tennis, boat trips, and hours spent on the house's back porch, Bush's future National Security Adviser would begin to give form to what would become the Bush foreign policy doctrine, a credo that would owe as much to the elegant and sardonic African-American professor from Alabama as to Bush himself. . . . The first to brief the President each morning - and often the last to speak to him at night - is Condoleezza Rice. She now finds herself beset, charged with failing to grasp the greatest threat facing the US (global terrorism) and to recognise the crucial warning signs that should have alerted the White House to catastrophic suicide hijackings of 9/11. . . . It is Rice who has come to be the cypher for all the alleged failings of the Bush White House. And on Thursday, when she gives her evidence before that commission, her performance will be judged not only for its personal impact, but its implications for Bush's re-election prospects in November. . . . Allocated her own cottage in the grounds of Camp David, the Presidential retreat, it is with Rice - who would like to be an National Football League commissioner - with whom the President sits down to watch football. They share the same deep faith - evangelical protestantism. But there is something more than that. The Bushes have formed an emotional connection with the resolutely single Rice that some suggest is that of a 'surrogate daughter', despite their closeness in age. . . . But if there is resentment over her access to the President, there is a suggestion too that there are government professionals from State, the Pentagon, FBI and CIA - never sure whether to be intimidated by Condi or to patronise her - who are seeking revenge for the White House's use of Condoleezza Rice as the point woman in its 2002 campaign to blame everyone but itself, notably the CIA and FBI, for 'failing to connect the dots' of the warnings prior to 9/11. . . . It is an assertive role that Rice has fine-tuned as National Security Adviser to Bush junior, telling both officials and visiting premiers (Israel's Ariel Sharon among them) where to get off. . . . Among those who got the treatment was Richard Haass, former policy director at the State department who recalled a meeting with Rice in July 2002 to discuss whether Iraq should be a priority: 'Basically she cut me off and said, "Save your breath - the President has already decided what he's going to do on this.'" . . . the foreign policies of the Bush presidency throughout its international crises have all borne the stamp of the Rice credo. . . . Rice insisted the guiding principals of America in the world should be the balance of power and national interest, not humanitarian interventions - a somewhat cold-hearted formulation . . . It is a unilateralist formulation that would back-fire on the Bush White House when it later needed friends ... through its dismissive treatment of the UN, its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, and tearing up of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If Rice shared these convictions with many other senior figures in the administration, her critics are now pointing to specific failings of Rice alone. It was Rice, they say, who briefed the President on the discredited claim that British intelligence had uncovered an Iraqi plot to procure terrorism - a claim for which both Bush and Rice had to apologise. And it was Rice who suggested to the American people in a television interview the image of a mushroom cloud over the US if Saddam was not dealt with. . . . Now it is Rice who is being accused of having dropped the ball over al-Qaeda . . . Rice's own anger over the accusations has been apparent both in the photographs of her, face convulsed with anger, and in the uncharacteristic and vigorous self-defence she has delivered of both herself and Bush's White House on television following the Clarke allegations. Interviews that have revealed Rice at her most assertive. [Also see "Condoleezza, Please Stop Smiling"] . . . If her enemies are expecting to neutralise George Bush's closest confidante, they may be surprised.

posted by LoZo 5:28 PM