As part of an apparent pushback against George Tenet’s new book, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hit the Sunday morning talk-show circuit yesterday to, well, it’s not quite clear what she hoped to accomplish. No matter the goal, the result was rather clear: a series of odd statements from the Secretary of State.
The real question to consider is which of her comments was the most bizarre. This one was pretty bad.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Tenet says this is the message he delivered to Rice two months prior to 9/11: “We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.”
On CBS’s Face the Nation, a perplexed and stunned Rice said, “The idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact.” Rice then said, “I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.”
I have no idea what Rice is talking about. Afghanistan lacked targets to strike? Here’s a radical idea: when the intelligence community urges a strike on Afghanistan, the NSA (Rice’s title at the time) could encourage the president to do what Clinton did: go after the terrorists Afghanistan was harboring. Strike training camps, go after bin Laden, take on the Taliban, etc. Why would Rice play dumb now? Worse, what if she’s not playing?
Then there was this gem:
In his new book, former CIA Director George Tenet alleges that there was “never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat,” suggesting the administration had made up its mind to go to war from an early stage.
On CNN’s Late Edition, Condoleezza Rice responded, “We all thought that the intelligence case was strong,” adding that even “the U.N weapons inspectors [thought] Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” She concluded, “So there’s no blame here of anyone.”
Putting aside the fact that Rice’s response was a bit of a non-sequitur, the head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei actually said that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons or was in the process of acquiring them. Weapons inspectors followed up on U.S. intelligence on WMD and only found “garbage.”
Which leads us to my favorite Rice comment from yesterday’s talk shows.
From ABC’s This Week:
RICE: The question was…how long were you going to wait [before launching a military confrontation with Iraq], given that it appeared that the situation was getting worse.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, looking back, do you think that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States?
RICE: I think that…uh…an imminent threat? Certainly Iraq posed a threat, and the question was, was it going to get worse over time, or was it going to get better?
Five years into a disastrous war, the Secretary of State wants to parse the meaning of the word “imminent.” Yes, it’s come to this.
I vaguely recall a time Rice was considered a serious person. Then she joined George W. Bush’s campaign team. Pity.