Faithful to the End

Condoleezza Rice believes future generations will thank President Bush for all he has done. No surprise there; she has been loyal to him throughout his two terms in office.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is now busy defending everything she and the president have done for the past eight years, which is no easy task. This week at the U.N. Security Council she claimed that the two have done all they can to make peace in the Middle East so that Palestinians can have their own state. Contrary to that position, many think that the Bush administration has been very partial to Israel.

Last year, Rice claimed that the Middle East had become a better place, thanks to President Bush. She pointed out that freedom and democracy are expanding. And when asked what she was particularly proud of, she responded that no other administration had been more active than President Bush’s in trying to create a Palestinian state. As if that wasn’t enough bragging, she went on to say that there had never before been as much focus on a two-state solution for the Middle East.

Besides Mrs. Laura Bush, no one has been as close to George W. Bush during the last eight years as Condoleezza Rice. She has practically become a member of the Bush family. Both she and the president say that they have a kind of brother/sister relationship. There is no doubt that she admires Bush. No one has heard her speak in a way that could be interpreted as even slight disagreement with him.

Few others have had such free access to the president as she has had. Some even claim that she is in love with him. At a dinner party in 2004, the unmarried Rice made a revealing mistake. “As I was telling my husb-” apparently slipped out until she quickly corrected herself, “as I was telling President Bush.”

In a recent interview with CBS, Rice seemed completely uninterested in polls showing that America’s popularity is at an all-time low in large parts of the world. She was not worried about a poll showing that only 26 percent of Americans agree with the president’s foreign policy. She also denied some historians’ claims that Bush will be remembered as one of the worst presidents in history.

Condoleezza Rice thinks that future generations will thank President Bush for all he has done for the country. She points out that above all Bush has stopped new terrorist attacks. She thinks that there is reason to rejoice when the president of the United States can stand side by side with democratically elected presidents from Afghanistan and Iraq, or meet a president from Lebanon who no longer has Syrian forces in his country, thanks to the U.S. In addition, the president has done much to aid poor countries, fight AIDS and vaccinate children.

When Bush moved in to the White House nearly eight years ago, Rice moved in as the national security advisor. In 2005 she took over as secretary of state after Colin Powell. Unlike Powell, Rice has not complained of bad intelligence regarding the claims that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Rice was one of the most eager to invade Iraq, pointing out the danger that the Iraqi dictator might someday have nuclear weapons.

She admits that America made mistakes when the war began, but today, all is well. She claims that Iraq has become a good friend of the United States. It is a dubious claim at best.

Condoleezza Rice will not be remembered as one of the great secretaries of state. She will be remembered for her limitless loyalty to the president. She did all she was asked to do, and she did it elegantly and with a smile. She played the piano for Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, and the Norwegian foreign minister isn’t the only one who calls her “Dear Condi.”

Less well-known is her active approval of various methods of torture against suspected terrorists, which came about in her meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.