Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Editorial: Dismay, but no surprise in Rice's nomination
From the RoundTable blog
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President Bush's decision to replace Colin Powell with Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state in his second term removes a moderating voice from foreign policy discussions for one more likely to echo the president's hawkish views. As his national security adviser, Rice is noted for her extraordinarily close relationship with Bush and has been finely in tune with his thinking.
Her nomination to head the State Department can hardly come as a surprise: Harmony with his own views is a high value for a president who likes to surround himself with people who make him feel comfortable.
But like-mindedness does not necessarily serve him or the country well.
Americans should recall Rice as an adviser so focused on a new Bush administration's foreign policy priorities that, in the months leading to Sept. 11, 2001, she ignored counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke's repeated warnings about the threat al-Qaida posed.
When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney pressed to shift retaliation for the al-Qaida attack from the terrorists' base in Afghanistan to Iraq, she - unlike Powell - had no apparent misgivings about prewar intelligence that ultimately proved to be wrong.
Bush acknowledges no mistake in launching that misbegotten and continuing war, though, and claims his re-election as vindication. He has escaped accountability and, if the Senate confirms her, so, too, will Rice.
She almost certainly will fit better than Powell in an administration in which hard-liners Rumsfeld, who apparently will stay on as defense secretary, and Vice President Cheney often trumped the nation's top diplomat on key foreign policy decisions.
The Senate needs to consider whether sharpening that hard edge will serve the United States well as it faces new opportunity and challenge in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the continuing threat of nuclear arms development in North Korea and Iran - while U.S. forces are bogged down in Iraq.
