The Economist has a quite unflattering look at Condoleezza Rice while reviewing two books on her:
Ms Rice’s star, which rose so fast, has plunged back into obscurity, and the reason is easy for anyone reading this pair of biographies to see. As secretary of state, she has mostly failed in grappling with a web of problems that she herself helped to create when she was turning out to be a notably weak national security adviser. Mr Powell presciently said of Iraq, “If you break it, you own it.” That might serve as an epitaph for Ms Rice’s career at the top of American policymaking.
In reviewing a biography by Marcus Mabry they describe her relationship with George Bush.
Which makes it mysterious how she came to serve him so badly. The national security adviser is meant to co-ordinate foreign-policy making. Yet in that job Ms Rice seemed entirely unable to resolve the many disputes between Donald Rumsfeld at Defence and Mr Powell at State. Even without that failure, it would have been impossible not to allot her much of the blame for the mistakes in Iraq. If she realised America was sending too few troops and had rejected all post-war planning, she should have told the president: she had his ear, and access. If she did not realise, she should have done.
Mr Mabry dwells at length on Ms Rice’s inability to admit to error. This quality of impenitence also extends to her refusal to accept any blame for failing to anticipate the attacks of September 11th 2001. The book presents abundant evidence of the warnings repeatedly sent to her by the CIA (one of the agency’s untrumpeted successes) and of her failure to take them seriously. He notes that Ms Rice seems to have had a blind spot about the potency of terrorism in general.
This was Rice’s biggest failure of all. She not only ignored warnings about terrorism, but later lied about even receiving them ad I’ve discussed in previous posts. In a column in the Washington Post on March 22, 2004 she wrote, “No al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration.”
Documents obtained from the National Security Archive showed that these statements from Rice were untrue. The documents include a January 25, 2001, memo from counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke to national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and “Tab A December 2000 Paper: Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al-Qida: Status and Prospects,” These documents show that Rice had received both warnings about al Qaeda and plans for handling them from the Clinton administration but ignored the warnings.
The consequences of Condi’s failure was seen on September 11, 2001.
