Condi’s Really Bad Month

By Scott Horton

Over the past month it has become increasingly clear that Condoleezza Rice does not, ultimately, call the shots on foreign policy and national security questions. The man in charge is named Dick Cheney. This has emerged from a long series of tussles, of which the response to the British-Iranian fracas from the beginning of the month and the question of closing the concentration camp at Guantánamo are the most obvious examples. Condi’s PR offensive has also begun to lag as voices in the press who were quick to credit her with a new diplomatic offensive have had second thoughts. While diplomacy may be defined as the “art of lying in one’s country’s interests,” a skillful diplomat still knows how to do it without being easily caught. Condi put her reputation on the line with a series of high-profile appearances in Europe denying the existence of European blacksites, even while concluding and signing deals concerning the blacksites on the very same trip. “It was rather breathtaking,” one diplomat told me.

Now her past seems again to be catching up with her. She has blown off Congressional inquiries for some time, taking the acutely undiplomatic view that questions from Democrats didn’t require answers. That posture is a difficult one with Democrats in the majority in both houses. Now her dereliction has yielded a Congressional subpoena, and today Rice told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News that she has no intention of complying with it. I previously posted her responses (well, the responses sent in her name by some underlings) and the Oversight Committee inquiries—from which it is very clear that her responses are not responsive. The issue at hand is the yellowcake uranium fairytale included in the President’s State of the Union Address, and the role Rice played in this story. Given that her role was focal and extremely embarrassing, it is understandable that Rice seeks to avoid attention to the issue. But her response is sure only to make the question fester.

Rice’s reply to the account George Tenet gave this evening of his July 2001 visit and plea for a preemptive attack against Al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan was even more pathetic than her response to Waxman. In her CNN interview, she absurdly parses the word “imminent” giving it a meaning at odds with the dictionary. It was a Clintonian moment (“It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”)

Tenet’s book convincingly portrays Rice as an ineffectual and indecisive national security advisor—as a figure who recognizes that the center of power rests with Dick Cheney and who is unwilling to challenge him even over his most catastrophic delusions. The last three months reveal that Condi’s move to Foggy Bottom has not change those core facts. She continues to be little more than a distracting ornament when it comes to critical foreign policy issues.