Politicians Not Statesmen
 

December 2 2004
Counterbias.com
Marc Krug
 

“Punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia.” In the Spring of 2003, these were the harsh words that future Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had for the three countries who refused to support America’s war in Iraq.

Absent were any words of conciliation, compromise, or cooperation — all of which would have been necessary if America were to secure real allies before going to war. But the matter of building a working coalition was of little or no consequence to Rice, except insofar as it affected George Bush’s political fortunes — and he considered it of no consequence, either.

Rice had already learned that to succeed in her current job, she had to please her boss, which meant knowing his beliefs, preferences, and predilections. In fact, her statement about these three countries was so close to his sentiments that the same words could have come from his mouth.

By any relevant standard, Rice displayed a rare mastery for pleasing her boss. She unequivocally supported Bush’s beliefs, however misdirected and misbegotten. She constantly championed his war, however barren of sense and bereft of legitimacy. And she unfailingly promoted his policies, however unlikely to succeed and unsubstantiated by reality.

In her years as National Security Advisor, Rice had come to know the three unquestioned truths of the Bush administration. The first was that politics always took precedence over statecraft and diplomacy. The second was that allegiance to the President’s agenda was required, which rendered unwelcome anyone’s inclination towards independence or self-direction.

The third truth was indisputably the most important: loyalty. In the Bush administration, loyalty had no equal: no other quality or personal characteristic — certainly not integrity, veracity, or competence — was held in higher esteem than loyalty was.

Unfortunately, once Rice learned what it took to succeed, she also began to resort to the guileful deceptions that were endemic to the Bush administration. With great swiftness, she absorbed the belief that, in the land of Bush, making untrue statements and engaging in duplicitous acts were far from forbidden. In fact, if these dishonest maneuvers served the cause, so much the better.

Although she made quite a few untrue statements during her years as National Security Advisor, most of them came in defense of the war in Iraq. She is, perhaps, best known as the originator of the phrase often repeated by Bush and his cohorts: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

As far as Rice and others in the White House were concerned, Saddam had restarted his nuclear program. Indisputable evidence of Iraq’s nuclear intentions could be found in the 60,000 aluminum tubes that Baghdad set out to buy early in 2001. These tubes, Rice proclaimed, “were only suited for nuclear weapons’ programs” (CNN, September 8, 2002).

This statement was both false and misleading. False, since these tubes could also be used for launching small artillery rockets. Misleading, since her statement bore all the trappings of irrefutability yet it was made in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

This entire tubes-for-nuclear-weapons-use theory had been exposed as dubious by the Energy Department, which issued three papers debunking the idea over a four-month period in 2001. it was also refuted by the International Atomic Energy Agency around the same time.

But deceptive statements were nothing new for Rice. She had earlier resorted to dishonesty during a May 2002 news conference in which she tried to defend her boss’ inept pre-9/11 behavior. In this particular instance, she claimed that Bush was so alarmed over the elevated terrorist threat levels throughout the Summer of 2001 that he specifically requested what eventually became the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) of August 6, 2001, entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike Within the United States.”

Unfortunately, the facts do not substantiate her claim. On March 25, 2004, the Washington Post reported the CIA as saying “the briefing was not requested by President Bush.” According to Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the panel comprising the 9/11 Commission, “the CIA informed the panel that the author of the briefing does not recall such a request from Bush and that the idea to compile such a briefing came from within the CIA.”

The briefing specifically stated that bin Laden’s possible US strike “could include hijacking.” This statement substantially undercut the credibility of Rice’s remark that “no one could have predicted” al-Qaeda’s “use of hijacked planes as missiles” on 9/11.

Furthermore, according to the LA Times (September 27, 2001), the Bush administration had been informed before 9/11 that al-Qaeda had earlier contemplated using airplanes specifically as missiles. This last fact seems to remove any remaining justification for Rice’s remark altogether.

As it turned out, the events of 9/11 became the focus for several of Rice’s mistruths. She wrote in a Washington Post op-ed piece (March 22, 2004) that during “the first eight months of the Bush administration, the U.S. worked hard to counter the al-Qaeda threat…The seriousness of the threat was well understood by the President and his national security principals…Our plan called for military options to attack al-Qaeda and Taliban ground forces and other targets — taking the fight to the enemy where he lives.”

First, what hard work the Bush administration may have performed to counter the al-Qaeda threat seems to have been so meager as to pass beneath the radar scope. In fact, Bush and Cheney’s counterterrorism task force, created in May of 2001, never actually held a single meeting. As Bush remarked in Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, “I didn’t feel the sense of urgency” about terrorism before 9/11.

Furthermore, the Bush administration seemed not to have understood just how serious the threat of terrorism actually was. In his strategic plan of August 9, 2001, former Justice Department Director John Ashcroft  did not even list fighting terrorism as one of the nation’s top seven goals. He did, however, put terrorism as a sub goal beneath gun violence and drugs. Keep in mind that, in addition to the Department of Justice, the F.B.I. was also within Ashcroft’s domain.

And finally, concerning Bush’s alleged plans to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban ground forces, you will find a far more accurate version of his real plans in Chapter Six of the 9/11 Commission Report. Rather than quickly “taking the attack to the enemy,” as Rice stated, the pre 9/11 attack plan “called for a multi-year effort involving diplomacy, covert actions, economic measures, law enforcement, public diplomacy, and if necessary, military actions.”

In addition to her mistruths about 9/11, Rice, in various venues, heartily engaged in two practices beloved of the Bush administration: blackening the name of Richard Clarke and defiling the reputation of the Clinton administration.

To accomplish the first objective, Rice claimed on CNN “that Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration whether he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the right direction — and he chose not to.”

Quite the contrary. Clarke had specifically sent Rice a memo on January 25, 2001, stating “We urgently need a Principal’s level review on the al-Qaeda network.” Rice regarded the threat with such indifference that the first Principals meeting was not held for more than seven months — on September 4, 2001.

To demonstrate the Clinton administration’s failure to help, Rice claimed in the same Washington Post op-ed (March 22, 2004) that “No al-Qaeda plan was turned over by the Clinton Administration to the new administration.”

Once again, quite the contrary. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, when Clarke sent the January 25 memo, he also sent the so-called “Delenda Plan.” Accompanying this was a paper entitled: “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qaeda.” Whether Rice read either document is anyone’s guess.

But there is much more to Condoleezza Rice, the inveterate teller of patent falsehoods. There is Condoleezza Rice, the astute politician — an important member of government who abandoned her job to take nearly a dozen trips to help Bush during his Presidential campaign.

As a rule, National Security Advisors are known for giving speeches only two or three times a year, usually in Washington and in New York. They also have the reputation for not viewing their office as a political one.

With Condoleeza Rice all that changed. After Labor Day, she made nine “campaign” trips. During these appearances, she would invariably utter some well-practiced, consummately artificial denial that her speeches served political purposes.

Nevertheless, in the latter months of the 2004 campaign, these “non-political” trips put Rice in the battleground states of Oregon and Florida once  and  in Pennsylvania and Ohio twice. And while there, nearly everything she said just happened to center on George Bush’s strengths and John Kerry’s weaknesses. Any remarks on the specifics of her job seemed to get lost in all the rhetoric.

She appeared in several other states, always promoting Bush, but sometimes it seemed as if she were promoting herself as well. Even at Summer’s end, it was well known that Colin Powell would soon be gone and the office of Secretary of State would likewise soon be vacant. By more than mere coincidence, she often gave the impression of someone auditioning to be his replacement.

As it turned out, Rice achieved both of her objectives: Bush was re-elected and she was chosen by him to be the new Secretary of Sate. Consequently, Colin Powell is now operating on borrowed time.

All of this is most unfortunate. Bush now gets another four years to work his mendacious magic; he now has a woman running the State Department so preoccupied with serving him that she once slipped and referred to him as her husband; and he is now free of the only man in his administration who could keep him in check and prevent him from making even greater mistakes.

Even worse, Colin Powel was also the only person in the Bush administration who seemed possessed of any wisdom, capable of any moderation, and able to exhibit any truthfulness — although his WMD speech before the U.N. made doubters out of many of us. 

Instead of Powell, we will now have Rice: an inveterate liar, an unabashed acolyte, and an unprincipled politician who has the unfortunate habit of placing George Bush’s interests ahead of everything else — including the interests of this country.

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