Today’s Must Read

In a speech yesterday to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee in Washington, Condoleezza Rice did a little saber-rattling on Iran, in a tone the New York Times described as “unusually sharp”:

“We would be willing to meet with them but not while they continue to inch toward nuclear weapons under the cover of talks,” she told the group, a pro-Israel lobby known by its acronym, Aipac. “The real question isn’t why won’t the Bush administration talk to Iran. The real question is why won’t Iran talk to us.”

How much do Rice’s comments reflect President Bush’s views? It’s long been known that few senior officials have the ear of the President like his secretary of state and former national security adviser. But former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan put a finer point on it in little noticed but exceptional criticisms of Rice in his new memoir, What Happened, published this week:

My later experiences with Condi led me to believe she was more interested in figuring out where the president stood and just carrying out his wishes while expending only cursory effort in helping him understand all the considerations and potential consequences.

McClellan marveled at her ability to remain at the center of the Iraq-policy decision makers since the administration’s earliest days, yet rarely receive much criticism about the handling of the war.

Over time, however, I was stuck by how deft she is at protecting her reputation. No matter what went wrong, she was somehow able to keep her hands clean, even when the problems related to matters under her direct purview, including the WMD rationale for war in Iraq, the decision to invade Iraq, the sixteen words in the State of the Union address, and postwar planning and implementation of the strategy in Iraq.

Although she had been the presidents top foreign policy advisor and coordinator of his national security team, she has largely allowed responsibility for all these matters to fall on people like former CIA Director George Tenant, Paul Bremer and Don Rumsfeld.

But it was her relationship with the President that was the controlling influence on her own decision-making, McClellan asserts:

In private she complimented and reinforced Bush’s instincts rather than challenging and questioning them. As far as I could tell from internal meeting and discussions, Condi invariably fell in line with the president’s thinking.

As a result, McClellan suggests historians may not be kind to Rice.

If, as president Bush likes to say, results really do matter, then history will likely judge her harshly as the person responsible for overseeing a number of the defining — and, at least in the short term, ill-fated — policies of the Bush administration.