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 Condoleezza
Rice is the National Security Advisor to George W
Bush. Now, you may be wondering, what exactly does that mean?
Well, the job entails a lot of running around with a plastic bag and a
pooper scooper behind the president of the United
States, trying to clean up his many
messes. If you're thinking that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to pull
off that kind of job, you're right.
National Security Advisor used to be a pretty important job, often filled by
a towering amoral intellect like Henry Kissinger.
However, the only time you're likely to see "towering intellect"
and "Condoleeza Rice" in the same
sentence is... well, you just read it.
It's not that she doesn't look good on paper. She spent 20 years working
at Stanford in various positions, eventually rising to provost, and she
worked as an advisor in various capacities to the first Bush administration.
But when you listen to her talk, it's impossible to avoid the flashbacks
to sixth grade social studies, and the well-meaning but stultifying teacher
who tried to explain world politics to you but fucked it up so badly that
you're still not sure what an electoral college is or why there was ever a
wall in Berlin in the first place. (I think it had something to do with
blocks?)
In 1998, George
Bush Sr. called Rice and asked her to teach his idiot spawn everything he
needed to know about the  world.
Undaunted by this Herculean task, Rice agreed to the request, and the
clueless Bush Jr. quickly became dependent on her smartitude.
Her excellent tutoring paid tremendous dividends in shining moments like
Bush's 1999 interview with a Boston TV reporter, in which he was unable to
name the president of Pakistan
while praising the military coup which created the anonymous fellow's
dictatorship.
When Bush walked into the White House with a solid majority of Broward
County, Fla., voters,
Condoleezza Rice was right by his side, whispering in his ear when he forgot
important civics facts, like the name of the Queen of Bavaria or the number
of states in the union.
Rice had all the qualifications for membership in the new Bush
administration — a close personal bond with the president, the ability to
make him look good (well, less bad) and (needless to say) deep ties to the
oil industry. Chevron even named a tanker after her. Rice was a former member
of the board of directors of Chevron, as well as Charles Schwab,  Transamerica,
Hewlett Packard and The Rand Corporation.
Bush referred to Rice, his vice president Dick Cheney and
Defense deputy Paul Wolfowitz as "the Vulcans," presumably because they used big words
that he couldn't understand. With the election securely litigated, Bush named
Rice his National Security Advisor and everyone proceeded to stick their
collective thumb up their collective ass until September 11, 2001.
In the aftermath of al
Qaeda's attack on the
United States,
Rice worked to become a voice of intellectual reassurance to offset Bush's
swaggering bravado. In front of the cameras, she somehow managed to be
completely unconvincing in the defense of the administration's actually quite
justifiable invasion of Afghanistan.
Behind the scenes, Rice had her hands full trying to run a Cabinet full of
maniacs, including Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, all of whom were
constantly at each others' throats over possible strategies, and the question
of just how fast the hostilities in Afghanistan could be expanded to Iraq.
 
U.N. trucks stockpiled in America.
When U.S.
military action to topple Saddam
Hussein became an inevitability (historians have
identified the date as September 12,
2001), Rice also became one of the leading salespeople in charge
of jamming the inexplicable war down the throats of reluctant Americans and
the reluctant rest of the world too.
Rice also brought her silver-tongued diplomacy to the Arab world,
reassuring panicky Arab leaders that the U.S. only wanted to bring
"diplomacy and freedom" to all the nations of the Middle East,
which is just what the monarchists, theocrats and dictators wanted to hear.
The response in a Jordanian newspaper was pretty typical:
"As for you, black Condoleezza Rice, swallow your tongue, remember
your origins and stop talking about liberation and freedom. Have you not been
taught by your cowboy masters that 'slaves' cannot liberate themselves, that
they are not capable to capture the large Islamic world whose cultural roots
are planted in the depths of history. The slaves who are  happy
with their enslavement, O Condoleezza, will continue to be enslaved. They
will never be free and will never free others."
Ignoring this good advice, Rice went right back to her cowboy masters and
toed the line on Iraq
(after all, she had the value of her Chevron shares to think about). In fact,
she and the also-black Colin Powell made the bulk of the administration's
case for the invasion, mostly because the old white guys Cheney and Rumsfeld couldn't get through the interviews without
salivating. Rice and Powell gave repeated speeches in which they warned of
the dangers of Iraq's
Weapons of Mass
Destruction.
At the time, everyone was convinced that Iraq
probably had some sort of weapons of mass destruction, based in part on the
fact that Rumsfeld gave a bunch of them to Saddam
Hussein during the 1980s.
But having successfully goaded Americans into sitting on their hands and
letting the "boys have their fun" in Iraq, Rice was suddenly
embroiled in explaining why no weapons were actually used against or found by
by invading U.S. troops. Rice also became the
administration's lead spokesperson in trying to explain the president's
decision to use outright lies to justify the attack during his State of the
Union address in January 2003.
She brought her usual fortitude to the task of explaining the president's
reference to forged and discredited documents which alleged that Iraq
had tried to buy uranium in Niger.
Rice explained this by making profound intellectual points like "It was
the CIA's
fault," and "I didn't know nothin' and
you can't prove it," and "it's the Brits' fault" and
"whoever's fault it is, it is certainly not mine, unless you think it's
the president's, in which case it's mine."
As of this writing, Rice's future role in the Bush administration seems
assured. Vegas odds are currently running about 7-2 that Rice will at some point
be selected as "fall guy" (or is it "fall gal") for the
uranium fiasco. CIA Director George Tenet
will have to go first, however, so hold your bets.
UPDATE: Tenet is history, but as of this posting, it looks like Donald Rumsfeld is next in line to get the axe. Grrl power rules!
timeline
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14 Nov 1954
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Condoleezza Rice born, Titusville (in Birmingham), AL.
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1970
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Enters University of Denver at age 15.
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1974
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B.A., Political Science, University of Denver.
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1977
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Intern, U.S. State Department.
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1980
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Intern, Rand
Corporation.
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1982
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Becomes a Republican.
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1986
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Begins working for the Reagan
administration as part of a Council on Foreign
Relations fellowship.
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1989
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Appointed to National
Security Council by George
HW Bush. Bush, introducing Rice to Gorbachev: "This is Condoleezza
Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union."
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17 Mar 1989
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"I started looking
around for a major and I needed one that I could finish quick. I like
politics, I wasn't quite clear on what political science was, but it
sounded interesting." Washington Post
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1991
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Named a trustee, Rand
Corporation, where she serves until 1997.
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7 May 1991
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Named a director, Chevron
Corporation.
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7 Oct 1991
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Named a director, Transamerica
Corporation (exact date is an estimate).
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1993
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Appointed provost, Stanford University.
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1995
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Chevron names their largest oil tanker (136,000 tons) the
Condoleezza Rice.
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1996
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The Hua
Mei affair, in which during the Clinton
administration, American military technology secrets are allegedly passed
to Red
China. Rice refuses interviews on this matter.
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1998
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Meets with George
HW Bush at Kennebunkport during the summer, to discuss foreign policy.
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1 Jul 1999
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Resigns provostship at Stanford University to heklp with George
HW Bush's campaign. Her fellow "foreign policy Vulcans"
were Dick Cheney,
George Schultz, and Paul Wolfowitz.
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1 Jul 1999
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Appointed senior fellow,
Hoover Institute.
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15 Jan 2001
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Resigns as a director of Chevron.
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22 Jan 2001
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Appointed National
Security Advisor by George W
Bush.
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May 2001
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Oil tanker Condoleezza
Rice renamed to Altair Voyager. Chevron's Fred Gorell: "We made the change to eliminate
unnecessary attention caused by the vessel’s original name." This was
likely done at the behest of the Bush Administration, but nobody is saying
anything. Multinational Monitor.
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16 May 2002
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At a press conference,
Condoleezza Rice declares: "I don't think anybody could have
predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,
take another one and slam it into the Pentagon -- that
they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a
missile."
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13 Nov 2002
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National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice declares: "He already has other weapons of mass
destruction. But a nuclear weapon, two or three or four years from now -- I
don't care where it is, when it is -- to have that happen in a volatile
region like the Middle East is most certainly a future that we cannot
tolerate."
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12 May 2003
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National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice declares: "U.S. officials never expected that we were going to
open garages and find weapons of mass destruction."
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13 Jul 2003
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National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice tells Fox News Sunday: "I believe that we will
find the truth, and I believe that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."
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24 Sep 2003
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While interviewing
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on his television show The
O'Reilly Factor, Bill
O'Reilly declares: "Last March, I stuck up for you guys. After
Colin Powell went to the United Nations -- and I said on Good Morning
America that I believed that we were right to go to war, the United States, based upon weapons of mass destruction and the
danger that Saddam
posed. And I also said to Good Morning America: if the weapons found
to be bogus, I'd have to apologize for my stance. Do I have to
apologize?" Rice says no, but offers no specific evidence for the
existence of WMDs in Iraq.
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10 Nov 2003
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During a five-minute
interview via satellite with Fox affiliate WTVT-TV, National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice declares: "I think that the administration
has made it clear that we have no evidence and have never claimed a direct
link of Saddam
Hussein and his regime to the events of September 11th, saying that he
planned them or controlled them or something. It is very clear that he had
links to terrorism that were broad and deep, including numerous contacts
with al
Qaeda, including an al Qaeda
associate, a man named al Zarqawi, who was
operating his network out of Baghdad. The network that ended up ordering
the killing of an American citizen, an American diplomat in Jordan, Mr. Foley. So, yes, Saddam Hussein had links to
al Qaeda, links to terrorism. But we have never
claimed that he had a direct link to the September 11th events."
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26 Mar 2004
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Former FBI translator Sibel D. Edmonds tells Salon: "After
reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, where she said 'we had
no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might
use airplanes.' That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a
lie."
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28 Mar 2004
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Regarding the White House
refusal to allow her sworn testimony before the 9-11 Commission, Dr. Rice
tells 60 Minutes: "Nothing would be better, from my point of
view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that... But
there is an important principle involved here: It is a long-standing
principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the
Congress."
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29 Mar 2004
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John F. Lehman,
Republican member of the 9-11 Commission and former Navy secretary under
President Reagan,
declares: "I find it reprehensible that the White House is making her
the fall guy for this legalistic position. I've published two books on executive
privilege, and I know that executive privilege has to bend to
reality."
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30 Mar 2004
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In a surprising reversal,
the White House agrees to let National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testify
under oath before a public session of the 9-11 Commission.
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10 Apr 2004
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Saturday Night Live
guest-host Janet Jackson spoofs her Superbowl
tit-flash in a skit about the 9/11 commission, in which she portrays a
flustered Condoleezza Rice.
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