Condoleezza Rice Strikes Back

Condoleezza Rice fondly recalls French President Sarkozy’s charming manner and now does so officially in her memoirs. In a 700-page tome, America’s former secretary of State reaffirms her belief that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the correct decision. While not denying mistakes were made, she blames her archenemies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Condoleezza Rice likes to imagine. Someone who knew very well how to stimulate this otherwise hardcore realistic politician’s imagination was Nicolas Sarkozy. Rice recounts, “Whenever I met Sarkozy, he greeted me by saying, “I love this woman.”

In her memoir, “No Higher Honor,” set to go on sale in early November, she gives her imagination free reign. She speculates, “I couldn’t help but think how different it might have been to confront the problem of Saddam Hussein with Sarkozy instead of [Jacques] Chirac in the Élysée Palace and Angela Merkel instead of Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin.” But things were different in 2003.

Memoirs, and especially political memoirs, don’t reveal true history. Writing history is the task of the historian, while statesmen (and women) take on the task of coloring the picture for posterity with their subjective memories so as to present their own role in the best light.

Rice still defends America’s invasion of Iraq as the right course of action. In light of the recent, popular Arab uprisings against dictators, she’s even more convinced she’s right. She sees what George W. Bush did as his attempt at a similar manifestation of freedom and democracy. “We pursued the Freedom Agenda not only because it was right but also because it was necessary,” she writes.

That’s her belief, and she’s sticking to it. In the details, Rice acknowledges the Bush administration made a number of mistakes in prosecuting the Iraq War and in the global war on terror. But she puts the blame for these mistakes principally on others, especially on her archenemy Dick Cheney, as well as on Donald Rumsfeld.

Both the former vice president and secretary of Defense already have their memoirs on the market, and both depict Condoleezza Rice as “naive and misleading” (Cheney), and she has been denounced as a Bush confidante who was in over her head and who glossed over conflicts (Rumsfeld).

Now, Rice strikes back. Both men accused her of completely underestimating the problems inherent in carrying out an occupation of Iraq with too few troops. Because Rumsfeld stonewalled, a White House crisis meeting didn’t take place until just six weeks prior to the invasion. But Bush signaled right from the beginning of that meeting that he wasn’t really interested. The president introduced the subject by announcing, “This is something Condi has wanted to talk about.” Rice was frustrated: “I could immediately see that the generals no longer thought it to be a serious question.”

After the meeting broke up, Rice’s deputy Stephen Hadley confided to her that he would have resigned over Bush’s remark. Rice remained in her role as Bush’s confidante, but did consider resigning over Iraq’s possible loss, wondering whether her deputy might not have been right. Things didn’t improve until Robert Gates took over as Defense secretary in 2006. In other words, not until Rummy was gone.

Cheney also gets his comeuppance. The vice-president and his super-hawks went behind her back and convinced Bush to create a military commission to prosecute suspected terrorists. She almost resigned over that as well, but she hung on and got her revenge in 2006 when chief terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al-Qaida figures were transferred to Guantanamo over Cheney’s strenuous objections. Thanks to Rice’s book, the world now knows whom Bush listened to in that instance.