Right now, the first line of Condoleezza Rice’s resume is that as national security adviser, she drank the neocon Kool-Aid and spouted bad intelligence leading to the Iraq war. Interviewed by PBS’s Frontline for the on-line documentation of its “Dark Side” documentary, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, tries to explain Rice’s failure:
We had a one-word description of the National Security Council… and that one word was “dysfunctional” ….
I asked myself many times: “How that could be? How could a woman as competent as Dr. Rice seemed to be—indeed, Secretary Powell had told me she was a sort of a protégé of his—[head up an organization that] could be so dysfunctional?” … I’d say simply she had her eye on the prize, and the prize was a Cabinet position—and a particular Cabinet position, secretary of state—and as national security adviser, one works one’s ambitions to achieve that position.
I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense. That’s the way people work, more by establishing an intimacy with the president than by bringing discipline and balance to a decision-making process, because when you bring discipline and balance to a decision-making process, you oftentimes have to make an enemy of people—of the vice president, for example; you have to make an enemy of the secretary of defense; and on occasion you may even have to speak truth to power with regard to the president of the United States….
If your main goal is building intimacy… when it comes time to discipline the process, when it comes time to make the process work, So when it comes time to tolerate dissent and allow balance into the discussions, you don’t always side for that discipline and that balance, but you get your job.
Madeleine Albright was just as nasty.
Where does this myth of Condi Rice come from?
What was her track record prior to being head of the NSC? Writing papers and academic administration. I am sure Stanford faculity politics are brutal but it doesnt seem adequate work experience.
Like George Bush, she seems a minor player in the Rumsfield/Cheney administration.
Once again the liberal bloggers critique Condi Rice without any real information. Enough with this liberal hogwash — give us The Observer's resident Ring-Wing stalwart, George Gurley, and his booze-swillin' saddlebag Hilly! Calling Mr. Gurley–we know you're in there!
And yet, Condi is the one running foreign policy now, not, not, Larry Wilkerson.
Yet another Washington insider who is bitching about Condi Rice because she has the job that he thinks he should have. Of course, Richard Clarke tried this old Washington parlor trick on Condi. Seems to me that she's still around….
Jesus Christmas, can you imagine a Kerry administration filled with these preening prima-donnas? They'd be constantly stabbing each other in the back because one or the other got better face time on the Timmy Show….
You know, when Condi is President, these clowns will go apeshit.
Any liberal or conservative should have either been insulted or scratching their heads when Condee said on network television, "we never could have imagined that someone would fly planes into buildings." This is not a remark taken out of context. She was answering the question, "how could we have prevented this?" Tom Clancy, a relatively popular author, wrote Executive Decision a few years before 9/11/01. To support this, it came out later that the President and Secretary of State were warned by US intelligence that they learned terrorists may be planning attacks against the US with airliners. How could someone with such a scholarly resume (not her corporate resume) make a statement like she did?