|
|||||
|
DON'T call me George, Mr. President. Only my wife does that." When George Marshall corrected President Truman thus, he was not being rude. He sought to establish an equation based not on familiarity but on what is more enduring, mutual respect. Truman testified to the loyalty his Secretary of State consistently bore him. Marshall gave independent advice but properly carried out the President's orders.
Sixty years later, the office stands devalued and debased as never before under its present incumbent, Condoleezza Rice. She has reduced herself to being her boss' doormat. The hype has evaporated, and her stewardship under President George W. Bush - first as National Security Adviser (2001-2005) and as Secretary of State since 2005 - has come under increasing scrutiny. Did she advise him honestly and independently? Any holder of public office, for that matter any mortal, has to meet certain tests - integrity and character; competence and intellectual equipment; and understanding and judgment. On all these counts Rice has been found wanting.
She was an utter failure as NSA and bears heavy responsibility for Bush's misjudgements and deceit. On January 18, 2005, Barbara Boxer, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sharply rebuked her during the confirmation hearings as Secretary of State: "Your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth. You don't seem to be willing to admit a mistake, or give any indication of what you are going to do to forcefully involve others. As a matter of fact, you've said more misstatements, that the territory of the terrorists has been shrinking when your administration says it has now expanded to 60 countries" (emphasis added throughout).
Faced with the criticisms, Rice cooperated in the writing of this biography in order to put her case across. Marcus Mabry, chief of correspondents for Newsweek, had the added advantage of being black, a fact he emphasises repeatedly in the book, mentioning how it secured him access to some sources. Rice gave him the telephone numbers of family and friends and "two in-depth" interviews totalling a little more than three precious hours.
The book confirms what was already known and exposes some dark facets of her personality, which only confirm that the Empress never had any clothes. The metaphor is deliberately chosen because, to Mabry, she has "a regal bearing". That Rice has some impressive traits none doubts. Self-possession and calm under stress are among them. Mabry has worked hard. Some sources "shared things with me that, to put it plainly, I do not believe they would have shared with a white biographer. That fact remains a reality in America today. It greatly helped me in writing this biography." He states the facts carefully, even ones that cast her in a poor light, but tries to interpret them in her favour. His admiration for her holds him in thrall and credits her with achievements that were not hers: "She played a key role in the reunification of Europe [in 1989] and the fall of the Soviet Union [in 1991]." She held the most junior post in the National Security Council then as director under NSA Brent Scrowcroft and rose to be special assistant. Rice transferred her allegiance in 1982 from the Democrats to the Republicans and yet worked for the Democrat Gary Hart, a presidential hopeful, in 1984.
In 1998 she became closely acquainted with George W. Bush. She spoke at the Republican Convention in 2000. "The rhetoric that Rice wielded to do it was surprisingly strident, especially given her biography. For a woman who had never been considered highly partisan, she had delivered a highly partisan address. But Condoleezza Rice had travelled a long road from Birmingham to the podium of the Republican National Convention, longer than most people watching inside or outside the hall knew. And she had come to win. As a young professor at Stanford, Rice had been so moderate that many of her colleagues didn't believe she was a Republican at all. Others assumed she was a `foreign policy Republican', devoted to the tough line that Ronald Reagan pursued toward the Soviet Union, but on social issues, like them a Democrat or at least a libertarian." Did she really believe in anything, except personal advancement?
The author adds: "From a realist's point of view, Rice's greatest success has been her ability to accrue personal power. That had not been her initial goal; but nonetheless, she never let ideology or even consistency get in the way of fulfilling whatever she judged to be in her interest at a given time. As important, Rice was unencumbered by a `personal myth structure'... which cast her as an outsider, unlike many women, people of colour, and members of other minority groups. Condoleezza Rice never conceived of herself as a stranger to the corridors of power. She believed she belonged... .
"Even being twice as good is not necessarily good enough; black and female leaders, like all leaders, are judged by what they achieve. And in that mundane sense, Rice has so far fallen short. The Middle East [West Asia], for instance, may emerge tomorrow as a more stable, more democratic group of polities than it was yesterday. But in the short-term it seems a long way from here to there. Indeed, the government's own analyses, from the Intelligence Community and from the military, judge the world to be no safer than it was on September 11. And while the war in Iraq, in particular, was meant to be a rapid demonstration of American power, in the end the experience has sapped the nation's will and resources, and instead exposed the limits of American might. From a realist perspective, then, while Rice has succeeded in increasing her own personal power, she has failed to enhance America's internationally."
Persons with that drive for power are ruthless and manipulative, overbearing when they can be and fawning when they have to be. This is the dark side of Condoleezza Rice, which her biographer covers up even while mentioning her flaws and failures. Here is a crisp summary: "Many of Rice's mistakes in the part she played in leading America to war in Iraq were a product of her own character including her arrogance and the nature of her relationship with Bush. For now Rice remains committed to the war in Iraq, but she [sic] throughout her life, she has changed her view based on who she works for... . She was put on a pedestal by her parents and, according to her stepmother, `She can't see down from there'. She was told as a child not to associate with `underclass' blacks. According to a close friend, Rice told another African-American at Notre Dame to stop acting `niggerish'. Rice didn't recall the incident and insisted that she would never use the n-word or any variation of it. She is estranged from her first cousin on the Rice side; the cousin speculates it's because, as the cousin put it, she's `a low-class black woman'."
There was an uproar at the magazine Essence, the magazine of the African-American woman, when it was proposed to put her on its cover page. Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post remarked, "Like a lot of African-Americans, I've long wondered what the deal was with Condoleezza Rice." The book exposes the deal with Bush, unwittingly.
Relationship with Bush
"Rice's greatest asset as Secretary of State has been her relationship with the President. Their connection goes beyond mere politics; Bush and Rice are virtual soul mates. Once Rice reportedly started at a Washington dinner party, `As I was telling my husb - ' before she quickly corrected herself: `As I was telling President Bush.' Rice told me she doesn't believe she ever made the slip. But she's so close to President Bush that he tells other world leaders that she's like his `sister'. But like many of Rice's attributes, that closeness may also have been a tragic flaw that contributed to many of the administration's foreign policy blunders." Well before the book's publication last month, columnists of distinction had done a thorough job at peeling away the mystique she had acquired.
Maureen Dowd cited a report in Newsweek that a foreign diplomat "was startled when Secretary of State Rice warned him not to lay bad news on the President: `Don't upset him' she said" (International Herald Tribune, December 15, 2005). Not surprisingly, for, as Brian Burrough reported in Vanity Fair (May 2004), given the rift in the National Security Council between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (supported by Paul Wolfowitz and Vice-President Dick Cheney), it was the NSA's duty to forge a common line.
"This, say numerous officials, is something Condoleezza Rice was unwilling to do. `She has no opinions of her own'; `her supreme concern is preserving her own relationship with the President'. She's a chief of staff, not an advocate, until she's sure he knows what he wants to do." The magazine called her "The Courtier".
In a definitive work on the NSC, Running the World (2005), David Rothkoff writes that people "who still work at the NSC or within NSC member agencies" told him that Rice "was so preoccupied with being the President's `body man', at his side every minute, whispering in his ear, being his `alter ego on foreign policy matters', `tutoring him on areas he does not understand or is not up to speed on' that she had let the NSC become weak and, worse, the NSC processes become weak" (page 406).
This clears the mystery that had foxed some as Ron Suskind reported in his revealing book The One Percent Doctrine (2006). "Colin Powell had told Bush in a meeting that the NSC process is broken and Dr. Rice was at the centre of it." But he was not sure whether she was not reporting to Bush or whether Bush ignored her reports. "Was Rice not reporting" the differences to Bush or was he "not responsive" (page 307)?
As the failure in Iraq stared every one in the face, Suskind proceeds to report (page 310) how she sought help from the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) Director George Tenet. "What should I do, George?" she asked "solicitously". He replied, "You have got a reputation to protect. You are who you are and it looks like you're ducking this. If you have something to say, you better say it." Two weeks later, on April 8, 2004, she did speak up on television - to sell the CIA down the drain. Suskind reports at length (pages 243-246) how she refuted the famous column by Joseph Wilson, former Ambassador to Gabon and husband of Valerie Palme, a CIA operative, alleging the administration's manipulation of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. Tenet had "a strong case of shared culpability to make; her job was to pre-empt the emergence of that case with overwhelming force".
In the current American lingo, the neocons are ideologues opposed to the "realists". Rice learnt to cultivate both, as James Mann recorded in his classic Rise of the Vulcans (2004). She was all things to all men. "Rice offered few far-reaching ideas of her own. `She was not a conceptualiser,' said Fritz Ermarth, one of the CIA's Soviet specialists. Instead, she managed to persuade virtually all the participants that she agreed with them. Even many years later both the hawks and the doves were still equally convinced that during these debates over Soviet policy, Rice had been in their corner. `I felt she was closer to us than to Gates,' asserted Dennis Ross, [Secretary of State James] Baker's principal adviser on Soviet policy. Yet the hawkish Gates, in his memoirs, repeatedly described Rice as a key ally and supporter in these same intra-administration arguments."
In mid-2001, not long after the editors of the Weekly Standard had excoriated the new President for his handling of the spy plane dispute with China, "Rice quietly reached out to the neoconservative movement that the magazine represented. Come by my office some time, she told William Kristol, the neoconservative leader; `let's talk, instead of merely reading each other's quotes in the newspapers.' When Kristol went into the White House for a chat, Rice told him that during a visit to Poland she had been personally moved by the importance and power of democracy there. She had become, she suggested to Kristol, a bit less of a believer in realpolitik" (pages 206 and 316).
Master Rhetorician
Mabry does not find her an "original thinker". Her mentor Scowcroft was impressed not by what she said "but how she said it". That is her forte. A superb communicator, glib, self-assured and forceful. As a colleague noted, "Condi has an incredible gift to speak quickly and articulately in front of television cameras and to come up with memorable formulations, but that gift is also a curse because she then falls victim to her own convictions - be it the `mushroom cloud' or the `birth pangs of democracy'. "
Her memorable quotes are even more absurd than Dulles'. Sample two. Uncertainty about the existence of WMD in Iraq was dismissed with a delightful mix of metaphors: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Israel's disastrous march into Lebanon last year was hailed as "the birth pangs of a new Middle East".
It is to the lasting discredit of the American media that for quite some time so many fell for her rhetorical flourishes.
In our own country, we have seen many a glib politician get away with such tactics thanks to ignorant TV anchors who do little homework. Mabry is highly impressed. "But most of all, Rice had been a master rhetorician. She could spin just about anything. She was always good for a sharp quote, especially on the kind of tension-filled issues that campaign coverage ran on, and no argument or question stumped her. For journalists she had been the complete package. Adoring headlines like `Condi Rice Can't Lose' had graced magazines and newspapers. The editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News even cheered, `The girl's got game.'" She often speaks in a manner even college debaters would disdain.
By 2004, sharp questions began to be asked. Prof. Peter Bergen and Scott Armstrong together posed "15 Questions for Condoleezza Rice" while the 9/11 Commission was at work (International Herald Tribune; April 8, 2004). At the core was her neglect of intelligence about terrorist attacks on the United States, prior to 9/11.
Even the ardently pro-U.S. journal The Economist's column Lexington called her "a falling Star". The columnist wrote: "Her fingerprints are on some of the worst mistakes of the first Bush term. She claimed the White House was unaware of the CIA's doubts about whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, for example, despite the fact that her office had received two memos on the subject and a call from the CIA director. But her culpability is deeper than that. When Ms. Rice ran the National Security Council (NSC), it was hopelessly dysfunctional - torn asunder by disputes between the hawks (Mr.Cheney and Mr.Rumsfeld) and the doves (then Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage)."
She lived in a bubble, which was "burst by Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The administration started by trying to give Israel the time it needed to destroy Hizbullah. Ms. Rice declared that the world was witnessing `the birth pangs of a new Middle East'. The policy was a disaster: America eventually had to broker a deal that left Hizbullah triumphantly in place... Ms.Rice has also proved a disappointing manager of the State Department - the institution that was supposed to be the engine of a new diplomatic offensive. She has lost her number two, Robert Zoellick, and her personal adviser, Philip Zelikow, both impressive men, and still has a significant number of positions to fill. The department spent an unprecedented six months finding a replacement for Mr. Zoellick." It ended with this damning censure: "Ms.Rice tried a dose of fudge during the first Bush administration (you can find people in both sides of the diplomatic wars of the first term who believed that she was on their side). But mostly she chose to flatter her current patron."
In a recent column entitled "Is Condi hiding the smoking gun?" (International Herald Tribune; May 7, 2007), Frank Rich tore apart her falsehoods on Tenet's none-too-convincing memoirs by asking pointed questions that TV anchors seldom ask. She had appeared on three Sunday Shows. "It's now been nearly five years since Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday Show with her rendition of `We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.' Yet there she was on April 29th [2007] on ABC, claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat. `The question of imminence isn't whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow' is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up the war's origins. Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa.
"He forced Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. `But that statement wasn't true,' Stephanopoulos said. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the President included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Haddley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Tenet.
"Apologists for Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is ancient history, just as they said of the CIA leak case."
The truth is that Rice is simply incompetent, in every respect whether as a formulator of policy, as a coordinator or as Foreign Minister (Secretary of State). Former weapons inspector David Kay called her "probably the worst National Security Adviser in modern times since the office was created" under the National Security Act of 1947. It was Rice who "gave the green light for Saddam Hussein to be turned over [to the Iraqis after the death sentence] despite reservations of the military commanders in Baghdad" (John E. Burns; International Herald Tribune; January 8, 2007).
Mabry never omits to mention a single unflattering fact and seldom omits to explain it away. This is typical of his approach: "The ultimate risk of Rice's tenure in George Bush's Washington was the creeping belief that her loyalty to the President and his policies had overwhelmed either her judgment, her perception, or both. Or, as Barbara Boxer had charged, her loyalty to the truth. The last charge was not fair; Rice believed what she said. But her determination to not show doubt or vulnerability, her unsurpassed discipline at staying on message, her need to win every argument, her faith in her own skills of persuasion, and her ability to convince herself of reality as she chose to see it - all traits that had contributed to her historic rise - conspired against the transparent frankness of, say, a Colin Powell. Condoleezza Rice didn't do confessions." She was not expected to "do confessions". Only to do the honest thing - speak the truth.
Self-possessed in public, she bared her arrogance to intimates. Her hairdresser in her home town was told, "I can outtalk anybody. Nobody is going to beat me talking." A teaching assistant at Stanford was advised, "They may oppose you, but when they realise you can hurt them, they'll join your side." She defended Bush's deficiencies and his crass ignorance of foreign affairs with typical assurance and insulting rhetoric that can pass muster only with the ignorant. "Governor Bush has not spent the last ten years of his life at the Council on Foreign Relations Meetings."
Mabry's concluding paragraph betrays his failure to size up his subject. "When her term is over, she will follow the path that the Lord has already set for her, though she can't know where that path will lead. And however history judges her, as both George Bush's teacher and his pupil - the skilful tactician who translated a bold foreign policy vision into the birth of a new Middle East, or the too-loyal consigliere who failed to save an inexperienced and irresponsible President - she will move on, she'll get over it." That, however, remains to be seen.
intellectual prowess
What is her intellectual equipment? What, her understanding of world affairs? She co-authored a book with Philip Zelikow based on their experience at the National Security Council of Bush Sr., Germany Unified and Europe Transformed; contributed an essay to a collection of essays she edited with Alexander Dallin, The Gorbachev Era; and a doctoral thesis, The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army 1948 - 1983. All this made her an "expert" on the Soviet Union. She suffers very badly when compared with McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. Mabry is no judge of academic worth, despite his graduation from Stanford and study at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris.
The book is generously sprinkled with the name of Hans J. Morgenthau. He is called "the father of realism" who "reinvented the study of international relations with his 1948 book Politics Among Nations". Mabry then proceeds to run down Carl von Clausewitz's classic On War. In 1939, long before Morgenthanu, E.H. Carr blazed the trail with his book The Twenty Years' Crisis. Morgenthau himself had a contemporary, Reinhold Niebuhr, whose seminal work Moral Man and Immoral Society was published in 1932. Morgenthau would have despised Mabry for his comment, more so for his puerile assertion that Rice's infamous article in Foreign Affairs (January- February 2000) entitled "Promoting the National Interest" might well have been written by Morgenthau. The sheer brazenness of the comment is shocking (vide the writer's article on Morgenthau, "An intellectual giant"; Frontline, December 6, 2002).
Since "realists" sprouted in Delhi after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power and won praise from American "experts" of equally slender academic credentials, it is relevant to emphasise that Morgenthau's "realism" was not synonymous with "amorality" or mindless pursuit of power. He pleaded for a realistic morality in an imperfect world of sovereign states. "There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action"; likewise, pursuit of power for its own sake is not only reckless but immoral. Even after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Rice dubbed Russia in 2000 as "a threat to the West and to our European allies in particular". She does not believe in "an illusory international community". She ridiculed "multipolarity" on June 26, 2003, in London, significantly, as "a theory of competing interests - and at its worst - competing values". It was a message to Europeans. Balance of power is outmoded. "It led to the Great War." But on November 20, 2005, China was told that the US would "keep a balance in this region". India and Pakistan were informed on March 16, 2006, that there should be "a military balance" between them to "preserve peace" which the U.S. would ensure. Around the same time, Iran was warned of the possibility of "anticipatory action" - a euphemism for aggression. No such threat is made against North Korea. In short, as William Pfaff, remarked, "the Bush administration wishes to rule the world" (International Herald Tribune; March 20, 2006).
Last year Condoleezza acquired some admirers in New Delhi. That was just the time her admirers in the US were beginning to see through her pretences. For all her showmanship, play-acting and bluster, what has she to show in intellectual achievements or in public office? George W. Bush was known for what he is. Condoleezza Rice was lauded beyond her deserts till she emerged as the person she really is - a warning of the media culture that sustained her and of the political culture in which she could rise high. Traces of that media culture, with its glib sound bites and gullible, chauvinistic anchors, have appeared in India in recent years.
In a recently published book The Assault on Reason (Penguin; pages 308, $25.95), Al Gore blames American TV for a steep decline in the quality of political discourse. The print media provides space for reasoned debate. Very few TV panel discussions come up to the mark. Pressed for time and obsessed with ratings, commercial channels opt, for the most part, for the second rate. Condoleezza Rice never wrote a memorable article, let along a memorable book. She was a star performer on TV channels. They richly deserved each other. The public deserved neither.
Printer friendly
page
|
