As White House officials

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“As White House officials try to control the latest fallout over President Bush’s flawed suggestion in the State of the Union address that Iraq was buying nuclear bomb materials,” says US News’ Washington Whispers, “there’s growing talk by insiders that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice may take the blame and resign.”

Even I find such an eventuality a bit hard to imagine, but it actually jibes well with a lot of what I’ve been hearing over recent weeks and months. With Steve Hadley taking the latest rap for the Niger-uranium debacle, Rice has for all intents and purposes taken the rap without having herself uttered the words. As I wrote to someone who knows her earlier today, “Everyone’s spin aside, the nuke issue was the biggest issue in terms of threat. And this was one of our best pieces of positive — as opposed to inferential — evidence. If she really didn’t read the memo that was sent to her — which I agree is possible — it’s inexcusable.”

At the end of the day I think it’s quite likely we’ll find that the true pressure for pushing the uranium story came from the Office of the Vice President, pressure quite possibly exerted through Hadley, who is generally seen as a Cheney-man at NSC.

But if Rice goes it won’t just be as a fall-gal for the uranium business. Because this unsightly view into the Bush NSC has only crystallized an increasingly widespread perception that she has simply done a poor job as National Security Advisor.

Mind you, it’s no surprise that any National Security Advisor steps on a lot of toes and makes enemies. It’s her job to discipline and force consensus — if only operational consensus — from the various ideological and organizational factions in the national security establishment. So the job requires slapping all sorts of people around.

But the criticism in most every case is that she’s exercised little of that disciplining, consensus-forcing, BS-catching role. That shortcoming doesn’t bear directly on the stuff we’re seeing now. But it helped set the stage for it in a number of important ways — a point we’ll get to in greater detail in a later post.

The point is that many people from both sides of the administration’s pragmatist-hawk dividing line criticize Rice in very similar terms: for not settling these ideological and inter-agency debates with any finality so that the execution of policy is not overwhelmed by continuing in-fighitng over just what it should be. One hears many stories of her presiding over meetings in the professorial manner of a seminar leader, asking interesting questions, and leaving the issue as unresolved at the end of the meeting as it was at the beginning. In essence, you hear many folks on both sides saying: Hey, choose our plan or choose theirs. But, for God’s sake, you have to choose!

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