The biggest problems with Condi Rice are (1) she does a bad job as National Security Adviser, and (2) she lied along with Bush, Rummy, Cheney, Powell and the rest of the crew about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.
There will be a lot of chewing over what she said to the Commission and how she said it. But the Big Pundits are likely to go easy on her. As our friend Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler has documented many times over, Condi Rice is a favorite of our sad excuse for a political press corps. “In Insider Washington, it’s a hard rule—Icon Condi must always be pampered.”
Somerby himself doesn’t subscribe to the practice. Commenting on her now-notorious statement in May 2002 that prior to 9/11, she “could not have imagined” terrorists using airplanes as weapons, he asks:
Has there ever been a less competent major official? Nine months after 9/11, Rice still didn’t know about this history, she says! Meanwhile, why did Rice fail to vet the president’s 2003 State of the Union Address on the matter of uranium-from-Africa? Simple! She hadn’t read the entire National Intelligence Estimate, the White House happily said at the time. But despite these (and other) astonishing incidents, the press corps has spun Perfect Rice Every Time. It’s a matter of Hard Pundit Law—Darling Condi must never be challenged. To this day, no TV interviewer has ever asked her to explain that amazing May 02 statement. Let’s hope that things are different tomorrow. Let’s hope the commissioners are less concerned with Washington social niceties and more concerned with the national interest.
Josh Marshall notes that privately, observers across the political spectrum consider Rice to be a bad manager:
Every administration has its interagency antagonisms, oftenbetween the National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. But this one's in a class by itself on pure disorganization and factionalism.
Think how many problems this administration has had which deal with one hand not knowing what the other is doing, contending factions pursuing contrary policies simultaneously. That's what the National Security Advisor is there to ride herd over.
Commentators and political analysts, of course, are merrily dissecting her performance before the 9/11 Commission. And some of them, like the good folks at the Center for American Progress, also don’t follow Big Pundit conventional wisdom.
But it’s easy in these things to get diverted by the nit-picking of facts, how well she looked and sounded and which of the questioners scored “gotchas”.
The truth of it is that the Bush Administration during it s first nine months was focused on its Star Wars “missile defense” boondoggle; undermining the Atlantic Alliance by opposing treaties on global warming, the international criminal court and regulating chemical and biological weapons; and preparing for military actions against “rouge states,” Iraq in particular. Transnational terrorism was a low priority.
But it’s one of the hallmarks of this administration to never admit mistakes. And Rice continued that defense of the perfection of Dear Leader Bush in her 9/11 Commission testimony. In initial reports, the press is dutifully picking up on her comment that there was “no silver bullet” that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
And while we’re hearing Rummy bluster about the need to show “will” and determination and military analysts line up to tell us that we can’t show “weakness” by “backing down” in Iraq, it’s worth noting that Rice today repeatedly defended the Administration’s decision – or decision by default – to not respond in any military way to al-Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in October, 2000, which the outgoing Clinton Administration recommended. (We should also remember that this attack was just prior to the 2000 Presidential election; the 11-M attack in Madrid was not the first time al-Qaeda watched a democracy’s electoral calendar.) Rice to the Commission:
We really thought that the Cole incident was passed, that you didn't want to respond tit-for-tat. As I've said, there is strategic response and tactical response.
And just responding to another attack in an insufficient way we thought would actually probably embolden the terrorists. They had been emboldened by everything else that had been done to them. And that the best course was to look ahead to a more aggressive strategy against them.
I still believe to this day that the Al Qaida were prepared for a response to the Cole and that, as some of the intelligence suggested, bin Laden was intending to show that he yet survived another one, and that it might have been counterproductive.
This was also a rather stunning piece of World War II revisionism on her part in her opening statement:
The U.S. Government did not act against the growing threat from Imperial Japan until the threat became all too evident at Pearl Harbor. And, tragically, for all the language of war spoken before September 11, this country simply was not on a war footing.
It’s well known that Congressional isolationists, mostly Republicans, bitterly opposed Roosevelt’s prewar preparedness measures. And no one would argue that the US was adequately prepared for Pearl Harbor. But to suggest that the US “did not act against the growing threat from Imperial Japan” is quite a whopper! Chalk up another bad World War II analogy.
And getting back to the second major problem with Condi Rice’s performance that I mentioned at the beginning, she also offered this observation in her prepared statement: “Because we acted in Iraq, Saddam Hussein will never again use weapons of mass destruction against his people or his neighbors."
That would be the non-existent WMDs over which we went to war. Old habits - lying about the Iraq War in this case - die hard, it seems.
No comments:
Post a Comment