Will Rice Suffer the Same Fate as Powell in Middle East Politics?

Critical mess: According to Inter Press Service, an all-star lineup of ex-advisors has been imploring the Bush administration to act strategically, not just tactically in the Israel-Lebanon war to avoid setting off a chain reaction through the volatile region. Chief among them is former ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who characterizes the state of the region in chilling starkness:

“A chain reaction could spread quickly almost anywhere between Cairo and Bombay,” Holbrooke warned. “…The combination of combustible elements poses the greatest threat to global stability since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, history’s only nuclear superpower confrontation.”

‘That this entire affair was ginned up by Bush/Cheney and certain political leaders in Tel Aviv to give cover for the eventual attack by the U.S. on Iran. At first, I refused to believe what seemed to be such insanity. But I am not so certain any longer.’
— Lawrence Wilkerson

Among other things, noted Holbrooke, a top candidate for secretary of state if Democrats had won the presidency in 2000 or 2004, Turkey is threatening to invade northern Iraq; the world’s largest anti-Israel demonstrations are taking place in downtown Baghdad; Syria may yet be pulled into the Lebanon war; Afghanistan is under growing threat from a resurgent Taliban; and India is threatening about punitive action against Pakistan for its alleged involvement in the recent train bombings in Bombay.

The apparent complacency of the Bush administration in the face of these events has inspired a succession of former top Republican policy-makers including Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser to former presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush; George W. Bush’s former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass to publicly call for a major reassessment of U.S. Middle East policy and its conduct of the “global war on terror.” Leading Democrats, including former President Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former secretaries of state Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, have joined the chorus.

The lone exception to the administration’s complacency has been Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice whose State Department has been under attack since the outset of the Lebanon crisis by the same coalition of neo-conservatives, assertive nationalists and Christian rightists led by Vice President Dick Cheney that pushed for war in Iraq.

In the early stages of the latest war, Rice, who is also the only senior administration official who has been in constant communication with European and Arab leaders, was most outspoken about the importance of Israel exercising restraint and not attacking civilian infrastructure in Lebanon. She was reportedly infuriated when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert failed to follow through on a pledge to suspend aerial attacks for two days late last month.

Rice, a Scowcroft protégée, has supported talks with Syria on the crisis, and, according to an account published this week in Insight magazine, a publication of the right-wing Washington Times, has also argued in favour of engaging Iran.

Before the Lebanon crisis, Rice appeared to be successfully moving U.S. policy gradually, if fitfully, towards a more realist position, particularly with respect to Iran. But she has now run into a brick wall in Bush himself, according to Insight.

“For the last 18 months, Condi was given nearly carte blanche in setting foreign policy guidelines,” it quoted one “senior government source” as saying. “All of a sudden, the president has a different opinion and he wants the last word.”

Her problems, however, may not be confined to Bush, according to another report in Thursday’s New York Times, which suggested that Cheney — and his mainly neo-conservative advisers — has become increasingly assertive in the latest crisis in support of Israel’s efforts to crush Hezbollah. (In fact, some of his unofficial advisers, such as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and former Defence Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, have called for expanding the war to Syria and even Iran.)

The situation is similar to the humiliation of then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who in early 2002 sought to persuade Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to halt Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian territories, only to be undercut by Cheney and, ironically, by then-national security adviser Rice herself.

“She had as much to do with cutting his legs out from under him vis-à-vis the Middle East as anyone else — either through outright agreement with Cheney, or, at the minimum, complicity with his views so as to draw even closer to Bush,” according to ret. Col Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff at the State Department.

That experience, of course, confirmed the demise of realist influence in Bush’s first term, at least with respect to the Middle East.

That Rice may now find herself in a similar position, having to contend with a resurgent Cheney-led coalition of hawks who are not so much complacent about the course of current events in the Middle East as convinced that their strategy of regional “transformation” by military means will be vindicated, is what is perhaps particularly alarming about the present moment.

“This whole business is nuts — unless, of course, you believe what the rumor-mongers are beginning to pass around,” wrote Wilkerson in reference to the Lebanon war in an email exchange with IPS. “(T)hat this entire affair was ginned up by Bush/Cheney and certain political leaders in Tel Aviv to give cover for the eventual attack by the U.S. on Iran. At first, I refused to believe what seemed to be such insanity. But I am not so certain any longer.”

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