[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Editorial: The Friends of George

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Editorial: The Friends of George

November 17, 2004
 


 

Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next
secretary of state, the whole world seems to be noticing
that George Bush is stuffing his second-term cabinet with
yes men and women. It's worrisome, although when the
president did have dissident voices in the top tier of his
administration, he did a very thorough job of ignoring
them. Optimists can regard the new team as a more efficient
packaging of the status quo. 

Our concern about Ms. Rice is not that she makes the
president feel comfortable. It's that as national security
adviser, she seemed to tell him what he wanted to hear
about decisions he'd already made, rather than what he
needed to know to make sound judgments in the first place. 

That was particularly true when it came to the issue of
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Ms. Rice, who appeared
so often on the Sunday morning talk shows and even on the
campaign trail that she sometimes seemed more like a press
secretary than a national security adviser, was the one who
told the country that Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing
nuclear weapons. And she ominously warned that "we don't
want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." 

Her staff knew that the evidence behind those claims was
extremely dubious, at best. Ms. Rice was either ignoring
facts that were right in front of her, unable to screen out
the bad intelligence, or deliberately misleading the
nation. In any case, she failed in her duty to keep the
president from seizing upon the same unreliable
intelligence to defend his policy of preventive war with
Iraq before the American public and the world. 

As secretary of state, Ms. Rice is going to be first and
foremost a loyal servant of Mr. Bush's agenda and
worldview, and that does not bode well for those who were
hoping for a more nuanced approach to American diplomacy.
Much more worrisome is where the people around her and
directly under her will be getting their marching orders.
Stephen Hadley, who will become national security adviser
after four years as Ms. Rice's loyal second, has ties to
Vice President Dick Cheney, as do other officials who have
been mentioned for possible top jobs at the State
Department. If Ms. Rice surrounds herself with ideologues
who adopt Mr. Cheney's my-way-or-the-highway attitude
toward the rest of the world, she'll be undermining herself
and the United States' national interests from Day 1. 

Ms. Rice, a former academic, has no real background in
managing a vast bureaucracy or in hands-on diplomacy. But
she has other attributes that could serve her well in her
new job. Unlike Colin Powell, Ms. Rice seems willing to
travel constantly. That's a critical requirement for a
secretary of state. Diplomacy is a world of formal
positions and personal relationships - breakthroughs almost
always occur when players at the highest level meet face to
face. And when Ms. Rice negotiates in her new job, she will
not only have an exalted title, but will also have all the
power that comes from having the president's trust and
attention. 

The greatest service Ms. Rice could do for the nation, the
world and the legacy of President Bush would be to focus
her considerable energies on encouraging a permanent peace
agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. This is the
real key to long-term stability in the Middle East, and
opportunities to achieve it have opened up with the death
of Yasir Arafat. If Mr. Bush could manage to do what Bill
Clinton tried so hard to do, but failed, it could be an
achievement that would overshadow many of the foreign
policy disasters of the first term. And Ms. Rice would have
proved beyond argument that she deserved the president's -
and the nation's - trust because of qualities far more
important than knee-jerk loyalty. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/opinion/17wed1.html?ex=1101705234&ei=1&en=49034f27f3db54c3


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