"I think there's very little that I can say but the utmost praise for a great American citizen, who served as a role model to so many millions of people in this country and around the world." -- Sen. John McCain responding to reports Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is angling to become the Republican vice presidential nominee.
DETROIT -- Old John's showing plenty of confused thinking these days, demonstrating a foggy grasp of the facts essential in understanding what's going on in the world. The media pounce on his nearly daily claims that al-Qaeda, a Sunni project, is getting essential support from Iran, a Shiite theocracy.
That's akin to claiming Gen. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia was getting material support from abolitionists in Massachusetts. But McCain -- like President George W. Bush -- finds facts in the Middle East inhibiting.
More troubling, though, is McCain's gushing over Condoleezza Rice, offering his "utmost praise" for her and dubbing her a "role model." What in God's name do you have to do to be a less than a "great American citizen"?
McCain was talking about the worst and most ineffective national security adviser since the post was created in 1947. Rice is now certainly in the running as the worst secretary of state ever to guide our republic's relations with the rest of the world.
Three people responsible for the mess we are in remain in office -- Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. All the other original cast members who brought us the war in Iraq and the enmity of the world are gone.
These "principals" in the Bush administration joined in ignoring the threat of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, leading up to the 9/11 attacks, and lied the nation into war with Iraq, creating the fiasco that followed and the terrorists it spawned.
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former secretary of state Colin Powell, former attorney general John Ashcroft, former CIA director George Tenet and Bush's "brain" Karl Rove have all been shooed out of public life, fired or convicted of crimes.
Bush, Cheney and Rice remain, a triumvirate of ignominious failure whose arrogance and maleficence will leave a curse on the nation for decades to come. Bush is at an all-time low in the polls and Cheney is held in even lower esteem.
But why do Rice's approval numbers remain substantially higher than her Bushevik comrades? Her serial lies are right up there with Bush's and Cheney's, and even a casual examination of her record reveals an abomination of public service. Why then do so many otherwise clear-thinking people give Rice a pass?
The usual suspects in the mainstream media hype Rice's thin veil of respectability. Her race and gender also serve as shields. Is it politically incorrect to suggest that a grumpy old white guy with her dismal record would be vilified?
Rice, often portrayed as the epitome of competence, the superwoman of world affairs, is, in fact, an incompetent bungler, a negligent administrator consumed with ambition and addicted to power and control. She is the ultimate sycophant, the supreme suck-up, fawning over the powerful and stepping on anyone daring to interfere with her insatiable lust to be in the company of the mighty.
For Rice, accepting responsibility is like a crucifix for Dracula. She ignored explicit warnings that al-Qaeda was poised to attack on U.S. soil. Then she claimed no one could have predicted "that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
Weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence officials warned Bush that bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes. The Federal Aviation Administration had issued alerts on the threat.
Where was the then-national security adviser? Working out? Buying shoes? Taking tennis lessons? Or palling around with the commander in chief she once revealingly called "my husband"?
Days after Rice settled into her White House office in 2001, Richard Clarke, a career government employee and expert on terrorism at the National Security Council, wrote her a detailed memo describing the imminent threat of al-Qaeda, with recommendations on a strategy and an urgent appeal for a high-level meeting to address the pressing issues and "time-sensitive decisions" that had to be made.
Since the administration of George H.W. Bush, Clarke had been tracing the evolution of al-Qaeda and he saw bin Laden's terrorist network developing into an "active, organized, major force."
Clarke sought to make Rice, his new boss, understand what was ahead: "We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida (sic) poses." He urged a meeting with the president and decisions on how to deal with the threat.
"We urgently need such a Principals level review on the al-Qida (sic) network," Clarke wrote. Rice demoted Clarke, never called for a meeting, and there is not a scintilla of documented evidence that she ever did anything about his dire warnings.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Rice was slated to deliver a major speech on national security issues at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The speech was scrapped after the terrorist attacks that morning.
The White House has never released the text of the speech, but The Washington Post got hold of excepts three years later. In her magnum opus on national security, Rice never mentioned al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups.
The only reference to terrorism was in the context of rogue nations, and of course Rice used Iraq as an illustration, a Bush preoccupation long before Sept. 11. The major theme of the speech was a call for a missile defense system.
Rice's area of foreign policy expertise has always been the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, her mindset a vestige of the 20th century. The Middle East is beyond her range. She once freely admitted to The New York Times that "I've been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not really been part of my scope. I'm really a Europeanist." No kidding.
Rice denied Bush's desire to use the Sept. 11 attacks as the pretext to lash out at Iraq. At a session immediately following the attacks, Rice later claimed, "not a single National Security principal ... recommended to the president going after Iraq. The president thought about it. The next day he told me Iraq is to the side."
But The Washington Post reported "six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the president signed a two-and-a-half page document marked 'TOP SECRET' that 'directed the Pentagon to begin planning military options for the invasion of Iraq.'"
CBS News reported that, five hours after the 9/11 attacks, "Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq." Clarke said Bush told him on the night of Sept. 11 to look for nonexistent links to Iraq.
I guess the national security adviser was powdering her nose or burning copies of her speech when all this was going on. In the runup to the war with Iraq, Rice went on to deliver some of the most memorable lies of our times.
"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," Rice infamously repeated as she marketed the war that was to become the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history.
She claimed -- with great authority -- that Saddam Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear weapon." Another myth Rice peddled was that there had been shipments from Iran to Iraq of specially machined aluminum tubes that are "really only suited for a nuclear weapons program."
The New York Times reported that nearly a year earlier Rice made the statement her "staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons."
The Times reported, "Ms. Rice knew about the debate."
She then knew it was a lie. A distinct pattern in Rice's public life is her willingness to twist the truth to please her sponsors.
Her fingerprints are all over the infamous hoax Bush sold in his 2003 State of the Union address, claiming "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
When former ambassador Joseph Wilson blew the lid off the bogus claim, Rice sanctimoniously said, "No one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."
Rice knew European governments, including the British, had serious doubts about the story, and she also knew, as The Washington Post later reported, that "the CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim that President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa."
Rice, a master at deflecting blame from herself, tried pinning the rap exclusively on the CIA, claiming the agency "cleared the speech in its entirety."
But the Associated Press reported Stephen Hadley, then her top aide, who succeeded her as national security adviser, admitted that "in fact he received two memos from the CIA and a phone call from George Tenet last October warning him that evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium in Africa was not reliable. One memo was also directed to Rice."
Caught in her deception, Rice turned to sophistry you might find in high school debates, arguing the bogus claim "was only 16 words" in the speech, therefore of little consequence.
When confronted with her lies, Rice dances and dodges with the best. When she testified before the 9/11 Commission and when she appears before congressional committees, she often does not recall key meetings or discussions.
Rice always filibusters, and her entangled answers to pointed questions invariably plunge into the nether-land of obfuscation. She sticks to her story, no matter what the facts indicate.
Rice became close to Bush while giving him foreign policy tutorials as he prepared for the 2000 presidential race and advised him throughout the campaign. Rice may be the only person around Bush who has read more than three books whom he doesn't find threatening or intimidating.
They share a love of schedules and routines. They enjoy working out together and talking sports. Rice became a charter member of the nanny circle surrounding Bush, joining his mother, Barbara, wife Laura and longtime aide Karen Hughes.
These women guard and protect Bush, tell him everything will be fine, his enemies are wrong and history will judge him to be a great president. Rice provides him with assurances that, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he does have a coherent foreign policy.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, saw the clever conniver Rice as she maneuvered to promote her own ambitions. The national security policymaking process under Rice, Wilkerson argued, became a power climb where she "made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president."
Rice also pleased her president in helping hatch the torture policies that she and others denied for so long. Last week, ABC News and the Associated Press reported Rice attended meetings in the White House Situation Room where torture was discussed and the Justice Department urged to endorse the legality of "harsh interrogation techniques."
Rice, Cheney, Colin Powell, then-attorney general John Ashcroft and CIA Director George Tenet were the attendees at the torture pow-wows. They took pains to insulate Bush from their proceedings that included chats about the use of waterboarding.
In 2005, Rice said the United States prohibits all its personnel from using cruel or inhumane techniques in prisoner interrogations. Rice said the U.N. Convention Against Torture extends "as a matter of policy" to "U.S. personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States." Rice must have forgotten the torture meetings.
ABC reported Ashcroft, the only lawyer in the group, got a little nervous about the conversations, saying, "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Rice doesn't worry. She'll just re-write history when she gets a fat book contract when she leaves office. She really is the perfect candidate for vice president. She could become John McCain's Cheney and effectively give the nation a third Bush term.
But Rice could never endure the scrutiny of seeking public office. She prefers pleasing the few, not the many, to get power. She'll get rich as a professional member of corporate boards.
The accomplished pianist, ice skater and tennis player will add accomplished business leader to her resume. She also plans to return to Stanford University, where she is a tenured professor and former provost.
Universities like Stanford always like distinguished faculty members. How many institutions of higher learning can claim a war criminal and supporter of torture on the faculty?
Condoleezza Rice is a fake, a fraud and the quintessential role model for failure in public service.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 15 2008 |