The Osterley Times: As Her Star Wanes, Rice Tries to Reshape Legacy

Condaleezza Rice is said to have accepted that the Iraq war is "a stain on her record" that she cannot remove whilst she in office and has set about collaborating with various authors who are to write books about her in the hope of fashioning a legacy for herself that is more substantial than just the war.

“The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy,” by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, comes out next week, while “Condoleezza Rice: An American Life,” by The New York Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller is due out in December. “Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power,” by Marcus Mabry, now an editor at The Times, came out in May.

Some of these books are understood to be critical of Rice's role whilst she was national security adviser, but it is understood that she hopes to have them say that she was a much better secretary of state than she was in her previous role, and she hopes to highlight her other achievements.

As President Bush’s top diplomat, she has lowered tensions somewhat between America and its allies, after four years of a go-it-alone diplomacy that had chilled trans-Atlantic relations. Despite criticism from conservatives within the administration, she has allowed her North Korea aide, Christopher R. Hill, enough space to negotiate a truce that led to the North’s shutdown of its main nuclear reactor in July.

She has cobbled together a six-nation diplomatic effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions which, although unsuccessful so far, has managed for more than a year to hold together on a series of United Nations sanctions against Iran. And perhaps most important, she has used those sanctions, along with tough rhetoric, to tamp down the national-security hawks in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office who have argued for greater consideration of military strikes against Iran.

In other words, she has - so far - managed to stop Cheney from attacking Iran. Those are the "achievements" that Condi is collaborating with authors to sell as her time in office nears it's close.

Condi - more than any other individual - highlights the failure of the Bush presidency. This is a woman who was once thought to be a candidate to be the US's first ever black and first ever female president. Bush and Cheney can both continue to insist that the Iraq war is going well because neither of them will ever again have to face the electorate. It is, therefore, the younger members of the Bush team, the people who hope to continue to have careers once the disaster of the Bush presidency is over, who are the best indicators of how successful or unsuccessful the whole venture has been.

Condi, it seems, isn't even welcome back at her old job:

On May 25, Stanford University’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, devoted the bulk of its front page to the university’s former provost, who is on leave while she serves out her term as secretary of state. “Condi Eyes Return,” read the headline, “but in What Role?”

While Condoleezza Rice has her eye on a major achievement in the time she has left in office, she is also taking time to reflect.

Within hours, the letters to the editor started coming in. “Condoleezza Rice serves an administration that has trashed the basic values of academia: reason, science, expertise, and honesty. Stanford should not welcome her back,” wrote Don Ornstein, identified by the newspaper as an emeritus professor of mathematics in a letter published May 31.

Online comments on the newspaper’s Web site were even harsher, a veritable stream of vitriol. One of the milder posts came from Jon Wu, who did not give an affiliation: “Please go away, Rice. We don’t want someone who is responsible for the slaughter of an entire nation teaching at our school.”

I'm sure it won't bother Rice either way, but it is a comedown for a woman once touted as the next President.

I have always said that Rice's greatest flaw was her inability to think for herself, a flaw that the Bush administration took to be a great asset, after all this was a woman who was very good at selling other people's thoughts as if they were her own.

In fact, her friends say that she rarely questions whether she is right or wrong, instead choosing to believe in a particular truth with absolute certainty until she doesn’t believe it anymore, at which point she moves on. “I told Steve Hadley once, I frankly prefer being coordinated than coordinating,” she said, referring to the current national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley.

National security advisers, she said, end up spending their time thinking: “Let me see if I can get Secretary X to do Y, and Secretary Y to do X, and let’s see if we can get both to do it.” She gave a nod. “I prefer line responsibility,” she said, echoing perhaps the biggest complaint about her time at the National Security Council, that she was more follower than leader.

So the future of Condi is the future of a loyal little foot soldier who took her orders from above. She is the person who sold the company line and, dutifully, reported that mushroom clouds may soon emanate from Baghdad.

Now, even faithful little Condi has accepted that the Iraq war is "a stain on her record".

This should be a blow to the few sad souls who still attempt to sell the Iraq war as a possible success. After all, Condi was once their pin up girl.

But the ideologues who still support the war, the Bill Kristol's and the other loons, are so shameless and so similar to Condi in believing in a particular truth with absolute certainty until [they don't] believe it anymore", that such facts will matter little to them.

After all, they have already lined up the Vietnam defence for when all goes wrong, the ridiculous claim that victory lay just over the next hill had they not been prevented from going there by the lame Liberals.

But, as I say, it is not the Kristol's or the Cheney's or the Bush's who hope to have careers beyond this failed presidency, it is the younger members of the team like Condaleezza Rice.

Ms. Rice herself steadfastly maintains that she has no interest in being on a presidential ticket, and says her intent is to return to Stanford when her term is over.

And the students at Stanford don't seem too keen on even allowing her to do that.

Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution who advised the American occupation authority in Baghdad in 2004, said it is possible, though unlikely, that Ms. Rice could change the historical record in her remaining time in office. “If she pulls a rabbit out of her hat on the Israeli-Palestinian question, and some kind of political compromise in Iraq, it could partially salvage her legacy,” Mr. Diamond said. But, he added, “If we keep going on the trajectory that is now evident, I think even her tenure as secretary of state is also going to be, frankly, pretty damned.”