A run of tell-all books on United States President George Bush’s handling of Iraq and the war on terror has cast a harsh light on one of the administration’s biggest stars: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The books, including this week’s State of Denial by veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, place Rice alongside Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the centre of a host of strategic miscalculations, bureaucratic backstabbing and dodgy spin-doctoring.
Rice (51) served as Bush’s National Security Adviser from 2001 to 2005 before taking over as America’s top diplomat, and has regularly featured among the most popular Republicans in public opinion polls.
A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre put Rice on par with Senator John McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani as preferred Republicans to replace Bush in 2008, even though she has repeatedly ruled out a run for the presidency.
An accomplished pianist, Rice has been dubbed by many the Diva of US diplomacy for her perceived role as a moderating influence amongst heavyweight administration hardliners like Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney.
Her background as a respected academic, a spartan lifestyle and deeply held Christian beliefs contributed to her image as a dedicated public servant above the political fray.
But the spate of revelations in Woodward’s book and other accounts of the administration’s handling of Iraq and its actions before and after the September 11 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington has the diplomat looking more Darth Vader than Diva.
Accounts in State of Denial and another recent book, The One Percent Doctrine by journalist Ron Suskind, portray the then-National Security Adviser as actively involved in some of the administration’s most controversial policy decisions.
These included exaggerating the threat of weapons of mass destruction held by Saddam Hussein prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and then foisting the blame on others when no such arms were found.
One passage in Woodward’s book tells how Rice publicly blamed the CIA for allowing Bush to make a false claim in his January 2003 State of the Union speech that Saddam had tried to obtain uranium from the West African state of Niger.
Then CIA-chief George Tenet, who had told the White House months before that the Niger link was dubious and successfully lobbied to keep the claim out of an earlier Bush speech, was furious, telling a colleague that ”Condi shoved it right up my [expletive]”, according to Woodward.
Tenet and Rice, Woodward says, had agreed 48 hours earlier to issue a joint statement sharing blame for the Bush misstatement.
”Now Rice had dropped a dime on him, blaming only the CIA,” he wrote.
After her appointment as Secretary of State in January 2005, Rice is shown as fully engaged in an administration campaign to quash or ignore warnings from US commanders in Iraq that the war effort was going horribly wrong.
Amid widening calls for a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Rice joined Bush in repeatedly arguing that the administration’s bid to bring democracy to Iraq was succeeding and represented an integral part of the war on terrorism.
That view was contradicted by a national intelligence assessment leaked last month which said the war in Iraq was in fact fueling terrorism and radicalism worldwide.
Potentially most damaging for Rice is a claim in Woodward’s book that she ”brushed off” an urgent warning from Tenet on July 10, 2001, that al-Qaeda was plotting a major attack on the United States.
Rice angrily denied the account on Monday, saying she could not recall the meeting but that it was ”incomprehensible” to think she would ignore such a warning if it had been given.
Twenty-four hours later her spokesperson, Sean McCormack, confirmed the July 10 encounter took place.
But he said ”the information presented in this meeting was not new, rather it was a good summary of the threat reporting from the previous several weeks.”
Other officials have also weighed in to support Rice’s denial she had shrugged off Tenet’s warning.
The cumulative effect of the many critical accounts of Rice’s actions, however, raises questions about her judgement and her hitherto teflon reputation for credibility.
The State Department dismissed suggestions Rice’s effectiveness could be diminished by the negative reports.
”Not at all” was the terse reply from a senior department official when asked if Woodward’s book was affecting Rice’s ability to do her job. – Sapa-AFP