Our Changing Globe

It now seems almost impossible to imagine that just over three years ago that Condoleezza Rice was seriously considered in many circles as a possible candidate for the Presidency.

Following her appointment as Secretary of State at the start of George Bush’s second term she made a mini-world tour and was greeted almost ecstatically in many countries. She thrilled huge crowds in Wiesbaden by arriving in knee-high leather boots and in Paris, the French ambassador to America speculated that, “everyone was determined to fall in love” with her.

Ms Rice grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and had this to say about the white supremacists that blew up the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church there in 1963.

“I remember the bombing of that Sunday School at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963. I did not see it happen, but I heard it happen, and I felt it happen, just a few blocks away at my father’s church. It is a sound that I will never forget, that will forever reverberate in my ears. That bomb took the lives of four young girls, including my friend and playmate, Denise McNair. The crime was calculated to suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations. But those fears were not propelled forward, those terrorists failed”.

In November of 2007 Rice told a closed meeting of Arab and Israeli envoys in Annapolis that her childhood in the segregated U.S. south helped her to understand the plight of Palestinians and the fear felt by Israelis , “I know what it’s like to hear that you can’t use a certain road, or pass through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I know what it is like to feel discriminated against and powerless”, and this single statement probably meant that no Israeli politician would ever again consider her to be an honest broker.

Rice’s big break came in 2000, when then Candidate George Bush selected her to coach him in foreign policy and after Bush admitted to her that he knew next to nothing about it an almost instant rapport apparently sprang up between them. They couldn’t have been more different however since Bush was a kind of reformed party guy and Rice came from an almost puritanical background.

Rice later described Bush as having “an incredibly inquisitive mind” and he went on to call her “the most powerful woman in the history of the world”.

Rice’s failures as Secretary of State could perhaps have been predicted if she were judged on her performance as National Security Adviser.

A national security adviser is meant to coordinate foreign-policy yet Rice seemed totally unable to resolve the many disputes between Donald Rumsfeld at Defense and Mr. Powell at State and even putting that aside she can be blamed for many of the mistakes in Iraq. If she failed to see that too few troops were being sent then she erred and if she knew but didn’t tell Bush then she failed.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, tried to explain Rice’s failures, ‘We had a one word description for the National Security Council and that one word was “dysfunctional” and I asked myself many times: “How that could be? How could a woman as competent as Dr. Rice seemed to be, indeed, Secretary Powell had told me she was a sort of a protégé of his, head up an organization that could be so dysfunctional? I’d say simply she had her eye on the prize, and the prize was a Cabinet position and a particular Cabinet position, Secretary of state and as national security adviser, one works one’s ambitions to achieve that position”.

The ongoing genocide in Darfur was all but ignored, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not improved and relations with North Korea, Iran, Syria, Lebanon have languished at best or soured at worst.

She refused to accept any blame for the attacks of September 11th 2001 and her campaign to promote democracy in the Middle East comes in for particular criticism. When the Palestinian elections and those in Lebanon created unwanted and unexpected results Ms Rice’s response was that they were simple aberrations although the administration later gave up on up trying to promote freer societies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The threat of putting missiles in several ex-soviet countries alienated the one country that could really have brought about a change in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Soviet policy was supposedly Rice’s field of expertise.

Condoleezza’s inability to admit to error was perhaps her greatest weakness and in almost every case it would seem that her style led to a deterioration in diplomatic relations. Rice contributed in no small way to the undoing of the Bush administration and that will be her legacy.

Related posts:

1. Supposing Obama Follows In Rice’s Footsteps
2. What Will Obama Be Able To Change?
3. Obama – Is It Payback Time?
4. Which Executive Orders Might Be Reversed?
5. Barak Obama – The New President

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