Condoleezza Rice

Her path to becoming secretary of state and key proponent of the interventionist policies of George W. Bush was not a direct one. In fact, prior to Bush’s election, she advocated a more restrained foreign policy strictly tied to U.S. national interests. But Rice quickly expressed a new comfort level with the expansive ideological and global-cop agendas promoted by the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Cheney. In September 2002, for instance, she said: “There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” (9)

Despite her strong association with the neocon agenda, one would be hard-pressed to define Rice as a neoconservative. (10) Still her background reveals at least one similarity to that political faction—she moved from the left to the right. Regarding her decision to leave the Democratic Party for the Republicans, Rice said: “I found a party that sees me as an individual, not as part of a group ... In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you come from—it matters where you are going.” (9) And since joining the administration, Rice’s rhetoric has taken on a distinctly neoconish flavor. Note for example this statement from February 2003: “Power matters. But there can be no absence of moral content in American foreign policy, and furthermore, the American people wouldn’t accept such an absence. Europeans giggle at this and say we’re naive and so on, but we’re not Europeans, we’re Americans—and we have different principles.” (9)

Her hawkish views notwithstanding, some observers think that Rice may take advantage of her new position to champion a more cooperative foreign policy. Rice’s perceived rebuff of John Bolton, one of the administration’s extreme ideologues, early in her tenure by failing to give him a new portfolio in the State Department is in line with this notion. Nominating him to be ambassador to the United Nations could be interpreted as Rice’s way of removing a trouble spot from the center of decision-making. Also, Rice’s willingness—after some significant horse-trading, no doubt—to support José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean socialist, as secretary general of the Organization of American States and abandon the U.S. effort to get a more right-wing candidate in that post has been interpreted as an example of the new secretary of state’s pragmatism.

Commenting on these moves, the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl wrote (May 9, 2005), “The emerging picture is of a secretary of state focused on solving problems and cutting deals with key allies. That necessarily means toning down U.S. preeminence and occasionally compromising on the hot-button causes of U.S. conservatives, such as Cuba or the ICC. Colin Powell tried and failed to lead Bush’s first-term foreign policy in that direction. If her first months are any indication, Condoleezza Rice will make pragmatism a stronger feature of the second term.”

Since the mid-1980s, Rice has moved briskly through the revolving door connecting government, corporate America, academia, and think tanks. Rice got her start in government in 1986, when she received a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship to serve on the strategic planning staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Under George H. W. Bush, Rice was as an assistant to the National Security Council, where she became a go-to person for Soviet affairs. Bush once told Gorbachev: “This is Condoleezza Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union.” (6)

Rice’s ties with corporate America include her membership on the boards of Transamerica Corporation, Hewlett Packard, and Chevron. Chevron named an oil tanker after her but later changed the name when she became national security adviser in 2001. As a member of J.P. Morgan’s international advisory council, Rice met frequently with some of the world’s most powerful corporate CEOs.

Rice has developed a close relationship with the Bush family, including with former first lady Barbara Bush. During the two years prior to the election of George W. Bush, Rice was one of the most frequent overnight guests at the governor’s mansion in Austin. During the presidential campaign, Rice repeatedly demonstrated her loyalty to candidate Bush, once referring to him as “someone of tremendous intellect.”

When Candidate Bush began assembling advisers for his run at the White House, his foreign policy team—which included Rice—took on the name the “Vulcans,” a reference to the Roman god of fire and metal, as well as to Rice’s hometown—Birmingham, Alabama—known as the center of the steel industry in the South. Among the other Vulcans were Stephen Hadley, Rice’s former assistant at the NSC and Bush’s new national security adviser; Cheney; Donald Rumsfeld; and Wolfowitz. “The Vulcans,” writes James Mann in his 2004 history of the Bush war cabinet, “represented the generation that bridged what are commonly depicted as two separate and distinct periods of modern history: Cold War and post-Cold War. For the Vulcans, the disintegration of the Soviet Union represented only a middle chapter in the narrative, not the end or the beginning.” (8) Most of the Vulcans, it turned out, had a distinctly U.S. supremacist vision of how the ensuing chapters of this story should look. And Rice became an early articulator of this vision.

A year before Bush took office, Rice wrote a major essay in Foreign Affairs entitled “Promoting the National Interest.” Her prescription for a new U.S. foreign policy centered on a critique of Clinton policy, which she argued was delinked from U.S. national interests, and was tied too closely to the opinions of the international community and to the precepts of multilateralism. “Foreign policy in a Republican administration will proceed from the firm ground of the national interest, not from the interests of an illusory international community.” According to Rice, “multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves.” She went on to explain why U.S. national interests should not be constrained by such treaties as the Kyoto Protocol or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Instead, the U.S. should return to the core principle that “power matters.” Instead of relying on “Wilsonian thought” of “exercising power legitimately only when doing so on behalf of someone else,” Rice recommended that when the United States focuses solely on pursuing its national interests, the rest of the world will benefit—what she described as a “second-order effect.” Concerning Iraq, Rice wrote: “Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from the opposition, to remove him.” (7)

After Rice was nominated as President Bush’s secretary of state in late 2004, Stephen Hadley—Rice’s right-hand man when he was her deputy at the NSC—was tagged to replace Rice as national security adviser, a sign that Rice had consolidated her grip over the administration’s foreign policy decision making. That Rice and her deputy now have clear control of the foreign policy reigns is mildly surprising given the scandals that erupted around the two during Bush’s first term.

Hadley first gained widespread public attention during the Niger uranium scandal. He served as a scapegoat when allegations arose regarding Rice’s mishandling of information about Iraq’s purported effort to buy uranium from Niger. According to the Washington Post, Hadley was told by CIA Director George Tenet that the Niger allegations, which were used by Bush in various speeches (including the January 2003 State of the Union Address) and served as a key justification for invading Iraq, were probably bogus and should not be used by the president.

Both Hadley and Rice were subjects of the 9/11 Commission’s investigation of the intelligence failures that led to the attacks. Even though he and Rice were shown a counterterrorism report in August 2001 warning that al-Qaida was planning an attack on the U.S. homeland, Hadley told the commission that he and Rice did not feel they had the job of coordinating domestic agencies before the attacks. For her part, Rice told the commission, “There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 11 September attacks. There was nothing demonstrating or showing that something was coming in the United States. If there had been something, we would have acted on it.” (6)

During the debate over her nomination to secretary of state, Rice was accused of refusing to acknowledge errors in planning or judgment and of avoiding accountability for the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “In the end, I could not excuse Dr. Rice’s repeated misstatements,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), said of his vote against Rice. (5) Massachusetts Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry were among the Democrats who also voted against her.

As the Washington Post reported in a front page story on Rice ( July 27, 2003), “She has ... become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration’s use of intelligence about Iraq’s weapons in the run-up to the war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues’ claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged. ... Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.” (3)

Among her many misleading statements are her insistence that she never received reports from the CIA casting doubt on whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Niger, even though her staff had received memos from the agency; and her claim that the Iraqi military was capable of launching on short notice attacks with weapons of mass destruction, a claim derided by observers as lacking an evidentiary base.

Commenting on this allegation, Chuck Spinney, the veteran Pentagon insider (now retired) who has made a career out of debunking misleading claims made by the Defense Department, wrote on his Web site: “Today’s Sydney Morning Herald contains an absolutely mind-blowing economic revelation. The mystery surrounding how Saddam successfully hid his Weapons of Mass Destruction has been resolved by America’s National Security Adviser, Ms. Condoleezza Rice. Her revelation goes beyond the need for a pre-emptive war, however. It provides a vision that could have a profound impact on the evolution of our industrial culture and future prosperity. ... Ms. Rice revealed that Saddam’s weapons programs are ‘in bits and pieces’ rather than assembled weapons.

In her words, ‘You may find assembly lines, you may find pieces hidden here and there,’ she said. According to the wording of this report, ‘ingredients or precursors, many non-lethal by themselves, could be embedded in dual-use facilities.’ But there is more! If the Herald’s reportage is correct, Ms. Rice implied Saddam’s distributed and seemingly inefficient production system represented a current threat serious enough to justify preemptive war. She implied Iraq could quickly assemble and launch these weapons. The key to her vision of this rapid reaction capability (a quick OODA loop) lies in Saddam’s ‘just-in-time assembly’ and ‘just-in-time’ inventory systems. If her words are accurately portrayed by the Sydney Morning Herald, Ms. Rice is suggesting that Saddam Hussein may be an economic genius on a par with Henry Ford and Taichi Ohno.” (4)

Rice’s books include Germany Unified and Europe Transformed (1995) with Philip Zelikow, The Gorbachev Era (1986) with Alexander Dallin, and Uncertain Allegiance: The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army (1984). (1)