Pat Dollard | Young Americans

I admire and respect Sec./Dr. Rice on many levels. I do not believe she has gotten as much from the MSM or the democrats for her accomplishments in her life and in her service to this country.

However, I fear the State Department has an unlimited supply of “pods” by which to convert and replace once strong, willful, and level-headed people into their drones. Aside from the U.N. needing purged from our soil, I believe the US State Department needs hit with a neutron bomb and re-staffed after an ‘all-clear’ … with possibly John Bolton as Sec. of State …

In the Driver’s Seat
Condoleezza Rice and The Jettisoning of The Bush Doctrine.

by Stephen F. Hayes - Weekly Standard:

Shortly before 10 A.M. on October 9, 2006, George W. Bush read a statement from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House. He fixed his face to look resolute. The previous day, in spite of its many promises over many years to discontinue its nuclear program, North Korea had tested a nuclear weapon.

“The United States condemns this provocative act,” Bush declared. “Once again North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond.”

The American response came three weeks later, on October 31, when Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and the government’s chief negotiator on North Korea’s nuclear program, met privately in Beijing with Kim Gye Gwan, North Korea’s deputy foreign minister. The meeting itself was a major concession. Although Hill’s boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, had given him wide latitude for his negotiations she had not authorized a one-on-one meeting. The North Koreans had been pushing for bilateral negotiations with the United States since the beginning of the Bush administration. The president had repeatedly and categorically rejected any direct talks with the North Koreans.

In fact, he had reiterated this position at a press conference on October 11:

And my point to you is, in order to solve this diplomatically, the United States and our partners must have a strong diplomatic hand, and you have a better diplomatic hand with others sending the message than you do when you’re alone. And so, obviously, I made the decision that the bilateral negotiations wouldn’t work, and the reason I made that decision is because they didn’t.

In order to facilitate discussions with the North Koreans Bush had agreed in 2003 to participate in multilateral negotiations, the so-called “six-party talks.” Administration officials say the president was as clear in private White House conversations as he had been at his press conference: The United States would deal with this problem multilaterally. There would be no bilateral talks with North Korea.

Christopher Hill didn’t care. He had been authorized to meet with the North Koreans on the condition that the Chinese representative was also present. But when the Chinese diplomat conveniently left for an extended period of time, Hill continued the talks. The North Koreans wanted the United States to ease the financial pressures resulting from year-old sanctions on a bank in Macau involved in shady North Korean transactions. Hill gave them his word.

“The [North Koreans were] especially concerned that we address the situation of the financial measures that has, in their view, held up the talks for about a year now,” Hill said following his meetings. “We agreed that we could–that we will find a mechanism within the six-party process to address these financial measures, that we would–it would probably be some kind of a working group to deal with this, and that we would try to address it that way.”

Hill did not receive–indeed, did not ask for–any assurances that North Korea would refrain from conducting further tests. He did, however, get the North Koreans to return to the six-party talks. Hill characterized the meetings as “positive” and “very constructive.” He seemed to be particularly encouraged that the North Koreans had reaffirmed their commitment “to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” But in a passing acknowledgment that the nuclear test three weeks earlier might have undermined the claim, Hill conceded that he was not yet ready to celebrate. “I have not broken out the cigars and champagne quite yet, believe me.”

While the North Koreans did return to the six-party talks in December, they were not willing to cut any deals. From the outset they made clear that they were interested only in talking about easing the financial pressure that Hill had promised to address.

In January, Hill quietly set up another informal bilateral meeting with the North Koreans, this time with the blessing of his boss. Planning for the meeting, and for other aspects of North Korea policymaking, was limited to a small number of officials sympathetic to the softer line favored by Hill and Rice. Vice President Dick Cheney opposed the bilateral talks. He was joined by several key staffers on the National Security Council, at the Pentagon, and at the State Department. But “the North Korea process has been run outside the normal interagency,” says a senior Bush administration official involved in the issue. Compared to other national security issues, this official says, the North Korea “policy does not get subjected to the same level of questioning in front of the president.”

In a May 9, 2008, interview, Rice denied to me that she deliberately closed the circle of presidential advisers on North Korea. “I don’t cut out people of my team,” she said. “Anything that I’ve done with the president, I’ve done with [national security adviser] Steve Hadley, the vice president, and now, Bob Gates. So this has been very much an administration effort.”

But confirmation of this gambit came from a reliable–if unexpected–source: Chris Hill. The busy diplomat made time to talk to Mike Chinoy, a former CNN reporter, for Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis, a book to be published in August. Chinoy had access to many of the key characters in the drama that has unfolded over more than a decade. Despite his consistent condemnations of the U.S. government for its failure to be more conciliatory and his attempts to rationalize North Korean irrationality, Chinoy’s book is very well sourced and impeccably reported. And though Hill is portrayed sympathetically, the narrative is unintentionally damning.

“To Hill, the Bush administration was still full of people who were opposed to negotiations, and who felt the mere act of speaking with foreigners displayed weakness,” writes Chinoy. “So the leading hardliners–Vice President Cheney’s office, the office of the secretary of defense, Robert Joseph, the outgoing undersecretary for arms control–were kept in the dark.” According to Hill, documentation of the policy deliberations was discouraged, and in some cases the demands for secrecy originated with Rice. “Some of the minimal paperwork business is coming directly from the secretary,” Hill told Chinoy. “She said, ‘Bring it only to me.’ ”

But Rice did more than just approve Hill’s proposal for another bilateral meeting with his North Korean counterparts. She took it directly to George W. Bush and sought to persuade him to reverse his unequivocal and very public rejection of such direct talks just three months earlier.

It worked. The president changed his mind. So three months after Bush threatened serious consequences for North Korea’s continued intransigence, Hill and his team feted their North Korean counterparts with “friendly toasts” at a dinner in a private room at the Hilton Hotel in Berlin. “We pulled out all of the stops,” a member of Hill’s team told Chinoy, “because we wanted to demonstrate we were serious and sincere.”

In many ways, George W. Bush’s reluctant acceptance of bilateral talks with the North Koreans is the story of the latter half of his presidency.

Bush began his second term with the kind of bold, uncompromising vision that had characterized his first four years in office. The ultimate goal of U.S. policy, he proclaimed in his second inaugural address, is “ending tyranny in our world.” Bush said: “My most solemn duty is to protect this nation and its people against further attacks and emerging threats. Some have unwisely chosen to test America’s resolve, and have found it firm.”

But that speech is better understood in retrospect as a coda to his first term than a bridge to the current one. In the second term, those who have chosen to test America’s resolve–the Iranians, the Syrians, the North Koreans–have often found it less than firm.

There are several reasons for this. Most obviously, the effects of the war in Iraq. At first, the ripple effects from that intervention seemed to have been what the Bush team predicted. Just as the fall of Baghdad after three weeks demonstrated the dominance of American military power, the decision to remove Saddam Hussein indicated the willingness of George W. Bush to make good on his threats. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, worried that he would be next, authorized his intelligence services to increase their assistance to the CIA. Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi voluntarily gave up his own WMD programs, telling Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi that he did not want to be the next Saddam Hussein. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak hinted at more open elections, and there were municipal elections in Saudi Arabia. But the troubles in Iraq mounted–from the intelligence failures on weapons of mass destruction to the continued presence of more than 100,000 U.S. troops–and seemed to limit the Bush administration’s options.

So Bush has lowered his expectations and, more than three years later, has mostly abandoned the tough-guy rhetoric that characterized his first term. No one has played a larger role in this shift than Condoleezza Rice, who has been the most influential member of Bush’s foreign policy and national security team since her promotion to the post of chief diplomat. “Her influence on the president is total,” says one senior Bush administration official.

In a Foreign Affairs article she authored back in 2000 as a representative of the Bush presidential campaign, Rice criticized the Clinton administration for a foreign policy so obsessed with diplomacy that it seemed to disregard U.S. national interests. “Multilateral agreements and institutions should not be ends in themselves,” she warned. Today, her critics claim that Rice has lost sight of her own admonition. “We have gone from a policy of preemption to a policy of preemptive capitulation,” says a disillusioned State Department official.

Rice began the first term at a disadvantage among the members of Bush’s national security team. Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld each brought decades of foreign policy and national security experience at the highest levels of U.S. government. Rice, a Russia specialist, came to the administration from Stanford University, where she was provost. She was a distinguished academic, but her highest level of government service came when she served on the staff of the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush.

But September 11, 2001, blurred such distinctions. After the service at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, Rice flew by helicopter to Camp David with Rumsfeld to join Powell and Cheney. Bush had suggested that this group–Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice–spend the evening discussing the coming war and the challenges they would face together. They started over buffalo steak and continued for hours.

“We had dinner together, and there was a kind of, you know, it was a kind of sense that these were people who had been together before, you know, they’d seen a lot together before, but they hadn’t seen this,” Rice recalled to me in an interview in August 2006.

This was different, and it was palpable in the room, in the conversation. It wasn’t so much anything was spoken, because it was sharing stories about the Gulf War, sharing stories–but you could just .  .  . I think I could sense there was .  .  . I’m trying to find the right word. Tension isn’t the right word, but anxiety. Anxiety.”

I asked about her place in the group, and whether she felt left out because Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld knew each other well. She cut me off before I could finish the question.

I’d been through the collapse of the Soviet Union. You know, that’s not bad. No, in fact, remember that I had–he had–the vice president had been secretary of defense when I was a special assistant to Bush 41 and Colin Powell had been chairman. Don and I have known each other for years, going back to Republican politics in Chicago and some corporate work. So, no. Not at all. But I was–you know, I’m a generation younger and so I was sort of standing out–well, maybe not a full generation [she laughed and corrected herself], half a generation, half a generation. So yeah, I stood back a little bit from it to kind of observe it.

Rice was not a bystander in the administration deliberations in the weeks and months after 9/11, but she did little to shape the major decisions that came in response. She was, in effect, a referee mediating the now-legendary disputes that featured on one side Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and the State bureaucracy, and, on the other, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and the Pentagon bureaucracy. (In reality, of course, the sides did not always line up quite as neatly as the early narrative histories would suggest. There were plenty of times when, say, Cheney and Rumsfeld disagreed, and many more when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz found themselves on opposite sides of one strategic decision or another. Rice, though, was almost always the referee.)

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