One can almost feel sorry for Condi, but not really. She spent the first two years of the Bush Administration lying her ass off about first the appalling failure of the Bush Administration to even consider the possibility of a terrorist attack from al Qaeda on American soil and then about the totally non-existent “danger” to the U.S. from Saddam “Just leave me alone to kill my own people and I’ll be happy” Hussein. Since then, of course, she’s done almost nothing but lie about all those lies she told.
Larison’s pummeling of Condi is enjoyably on-target, while it’s fun to read Jennifer and Bret dumping on Condi for not being terrible enough—in particular, for not invading North Korea, which they seem to regard as eminently doable. Both recycle the charge that she was a terrible national security advisor. Well, if it’s a national security advisor’s job to do what the president wants her to do, Condi was probably the best NCA in history. I think that she sized up Bush perfectly when she first met him, realizing that this was a guy who wanted to have smart people work for him, as long as they never talked down to him, never patronized him, and never, ever told him something he didn’t want to hear.
Faulting Rice for not mediating the rift between Rumsfeld/Cheney and Colin Powell is like faulting her for not mediating between a glacier and a volcano. In any event, Colin, like previous four-star Secretary of State Alexander Haig, had lost the race before he started it. He simply couldn’t keep the “let me tell you how I won the first Gulf War, son” tone out of his voice, and Bush hated it. In political terms, it was probably Condi’s greatest triumph to enlist Powell’s immense and largely undeserved prestige on behalf of the greatest unforced error in America’s diplomatic and military histories. Nice job, Colin! Nice job, Condi! Nice job, Republicans!
Afterwords
Both Bret and Jennifer despise Rice for failing to maintain the early Bush Administration’s disastrous faith not in American exceptionalism but rather in American omnipotence. Of course, this was actually Bush’s decision, not Condi’s. She was only the instrument.
