Surely and sorely, you remember that day? That’s when President George W. Bush became the vaunted Commander in Chief. Amazingly, Gregory, who has wistfully remarked how the late Tim Russert, the previous moderator of MTP, admonished him to ask the “respectful” but “tough questions.” He, however, asked Rice nothing about Afghanistan. He asked her about US foreign policy being “humble”; about Darfur; about North Korea; and about her “feelings” regarding Barack Obama being elected president.
Another “tough question” that wasn’t asked was about her knowledge regarding the Bush administration torture policy, which had been endorsed by higher-ups like her at a National Security Council Principals meeting. But America doesn’t engage in torture; only “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Another “tough question” not asked was about the Bush administration’s use of preemptive strike. That rationale led to the US invasion of Iraq, causing the Bush Administration to take its eye off the real “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan, which allowed Osama bin-Laden and the remnants of the defeated Taliban to escape and reemerge in the nearly impenetrable border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now Pakistan, a seemingly weakened state, is in the target sight of al Qaeda-affiliated Islamicists who would love to get their Sharia-infested hands on that state’s nuclear arsenal.
Rice herself only mentioned Afghanistan in passing, but there was no review of it or the general fact that the Bush foreign policy agenda has pretty much been a bust, a failure. Rice could not even get the Israelis or the Palestinians to show up for a bogus peace process photo opp.
This is the kind of “tough” questioning that David Gregory meted out on supposedly the flagship program of Sunday morning chatter-heads?
In an unpublished 2004 article, on the eve of Bush winning a second term, I wrote the following:
The Velvet Glove of Condoleezza Rice
If George W. Bush accedes to the throne of the presidency a second time, it’s a sure bet that Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, will become his next secretary of state after the loyal but damaged Colin Powell departs. If she goes before the senate for confirmation, she should be approved and then impeached for her dismal job as the national security adviser. As the national security adviser it was on her watch that the greatest intelligence debacle happened, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The mainstream media has generally given Ms. Rice a free pass due to the fact that she wears a velvet glove: she’s conventionally attractive, well-groomed, flashes a killer smile, is intelligent (also known as “articulate” for a black), and is a NTN: a non-threatening Negro. She’s the kind of black that isn’t like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. However, she’s deadly and doesn’t mind wielding power. Up until now she has had the façade of competence, but that is slowly being stripped away as the nation learns about what the Bush administration wasn’t doing before 9/11, namely not paying attention to forthcoming war clouds. Richard Clarke’s book Against All Enemies and his recent testimony before the 9/11 commission castes her, as well as her boss, in a not too flattering light.
It seems that the national security adviser, Ms. Rice, never took the threat of a devastating terrorist attack on American soil as a serious concern; certainly not as seriously as did Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet. The various components of the national security apparatus—CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, Defense Department—had various bit and pieces: hearing terrorist chatter, knew that some of the 9/11 hijackers were in the United States, and that something was up and possibly forthcoming. She received such about an attack on August 26, 2001—sixteen days September 11. Yet nothing was done; nothing was sorted out, which is supposedly the job of the national security adviser. To sort out the competing claims of various departments, formulate a clear policy and present it to the president of the United States, the nation’s commander in chief. That didn’t happen.
Rice appeared to be have been blasé about al-Qaeda despite receiving warnings from Clarke, a career civil servant who served in Republican and Democratic administrations. Her predecessor in the Clinton administration, Sandy Berger, had even briefed her about terrorism. But she was asleep at the wheel, like her boss who has been characterized as such by Clarke and Paul O’Neill, the former treasury secretary, whose views of the “war president” was chronicled in another book, The Price of Loyalty, written by Ron Suskind. In both books, Bush is described as disengaged with critical issues of the day and led around by his subordinates: Karl Rove, Rice, and Paul Wolfowitz. Rice cemented her relationship with the president by tutoring him on the intricacies and finer points U.S. foreign policy issues while he served as the governor of the Lone Star State. Other than Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, she appears to have his ear but not the nation’s interests at heart.
She—along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his lieutenant Wolfowitz—drew a direct line between al-Qaeda and Iraq, helping the administration to rationalize and justify an attack on Iraq despite it having nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. She articulated the new policy of preemption as defined in the National Security Strategy of September 2002. It is questionable as to whether or not the United States is safer from terrorism by attacking Iraq—a dilapidated country—than going after al-Qaeda and its worldwide network.
The mindset of people like her and others in the administration was that of yesterday’s Cold Warrior: interested in Strategic Defense Initiative, going back and getting Iraq, and crafting neo-imperialist policies that makes the U.S. the dominant world under a mask of democracy and free markets. The Number One problem, however, that besets the Middle East—the never-ending war between the Israelis and the Palestinians—is not seriously addressed. The Bush administration so-called “Road Map,” which has been dormant for months, can officially be declared dead now that Hamas’s Sheik Yassin has been assassinated by the Israeli Defense Forces.
When Senator John Kerry unknowingly intimated that the Bush administration and its operative were “crooks” and “liars,” he wasn’t just engaging in un-scripted partisan attacks. What has been consistently revealed, without much assistance from the mainstream media, is the torrent of prevarication that comes from this administration. In regard to the war, how it has been conducted, or even in the matter of Medicare, where it has been alleged that figures were “cooked” and a career civil servant was prevented from giving information contrary to the administration’s, the Bush administration shows a cynical disregard for truth in governance.
And this cynical disregard for the truth may well be the most lasting legacy of the Bush administration whether it wins another term or not. In the middle of the torrent of deceptions are Rice and Colin Powell. Both have achieved power as players in this Republican administration but at a great cost to their integrity. One senses that Powell has realized that he signed on with a bunch of lunatics, but as a good soldier he sucked it up and marched on—until January 20th 2005. He’ll probably engage in some mea culpable activities to restore his reputation as a man of integrity.
Rice? She appears to be a true believer; she has signed on with an administration that arguably increased the nation’s vulnerabilities by not addressing the root causes of terrorism. Whatever they are, they don’t matter because Rice, the nation’s security adviser doesn’t see them, and the president doesn’t ask what he needs to know to keep the nation safe.
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And yay hey to the Rice reveal. I cannot fathom her apologists, calling her the Good One, the tragic case, ooh-ah-ing over her possible vote for Obama. Rice was pivotal and instrumental in the failure of conscience that was this admin's embracing of torture. And she MUST have gotten earfuls from her overseas equivalents, in private, about the fearful damage torture was inflicting to the US, yet she ceaselessly enabled and promoted our most shameful violence against arrestees. Her inability to get what is now obvious to much of the Right, that we worked against our own best interests, makes her a profoundly compromised intellect, ethicist, or both. She was a third-rate would-be constrained Speer in regards to implementing the architecture of the foreign policy Reich fantasies of the neocons, but a Speer nonetheless. She has earned a place at the Nuremberg docket we are tragically unlikely to hold.