Analysts have been giving Condoleezza Rice high marks for her feisty and intellectual performance in front of the Republican-dominated Senate Foreign Relations Committee who yesterday rubber stamped her nomination by President Bush as his new secretary of state to replace Colin Powell. Observers have latched on to her comment that the time for diplomacy was now. They suggest that with a secretary of state who, unlike Powell, has the president’s ear, a new era is about to open in America’s relationship with its friends and allies.
However, something very significant in the Rice performance on the first day of her hearing has escaped comment. When challenged by Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer on her certainty over Saddam’s WMD in the run-up to the invasion, Rice replied angrily that she would not have her integrity questioned. In that testy response may lie the real shape of the era of diplomacy that Rice is planning at the State Department. Even though the president himself has admitted that Saddam no longer had WMD, Rice is in no way inclined to explain to anyone why she and her boss were plain wrong. Her integrity is not to be questioned and how dare even a US senator suggest that maybe, just once, she abandoned her high intellectual and moral standards and chose to see the world the way her chief wanted it to be. At best this shows a profound lack of humility that bodes ill for her promised era of diplomacy, which she insisted Tuesday must be a dialogue, not a monologue. Two years ago Rice said that there could be no lack of moral content to US foreign policy and accused European states of giggling at what they saw as Washington’s “naivety”.
What is clearly naive about the new chief of US foreign policy is her inability to appreciate the degree to which US integrity has already been damaged in the Middle East and further afield. Virtually everything that the US has done in Iraq, from the false excuses for invasion to the abuses of Abu Ghraib and the fat reconstruction contracts handed out to US big business, including Halliburton, once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, have seriously damaged US integrity. Trust once destroyed is hard to rebuild. If Washington’s new chief diplomat cannot see what has gone wrong and the restitution needed to even start restoring it, then she is not as smart as people are saying she is.
Her confirmation hearing offered Rice a chance to make a new beginning and offer some hope to US friends in the Middle East that Washington will review the tawdry set of simplistic policies that have plunged the region into turmoil. She had no such message. Far from being reflective and admitting the blindingly obvious fact that the administration had totally misread Iraq and unleashed the very terrorism Saddam’s ouster was claimed to destroy, Rice showed the same arrogance that created the debacle in the first place.
She could yet row back and startle the world with an even-handed intervention on Palestine but nothing in her confirmation hearing gives cause for hope.
