In the real world, awful national security advisors who get everything wrong get fired. In Bush’s world of Twilight Zone politics, they get promoted to Secretary of State.
On the two big national security crises of Bush’s first term — the attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq — Rice had everything backwards. Before 9/11, she was unconcerned with terrorism and focused her attention on missile defense. She saw a memo alerting her to the fact that bin Laden was “determined to strike inside the U.S.” and, like her boss, decided it was only a “historical” update. Conversely, Rice saw Iraq as an immediate threat. She carelessly threw around ominous threats about “mushroom clouds” to describe a regime that had no weapons of mass destruction.
The real threat she didn’t take seriously enough and lesser threat she took too seriously. For her efforts, Rice is getting promoted.
But aside from the specific (and catastrophic) failures, Rice still leaves her post with an abysmal on-the-job record. At the end of the day, she just wasn’t very good at her job. As Slate’s Fred Kaplan explained in April:
One clear inference can be drawn from Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 commission this morning: She has been a bad national security adviser — passive, sluggish, and either unable or unwilling to tie the loose strands of the bureaucracy into a sensible vision or policy. In short, she has not done what national security advisers are supposed to do.
Rice was inept at sending the right intelligence information up the ladder to the White House, and equally bad at making sure information went down the chain to other cabinet agencies, intelligence officials, or law enforcement officials. She also has had a Bush-like affinity for passing the buck.
Just as the Bush administration has declined to admit any mistakes, Condi Rice declined to take any responsibility. No, she answered, the FBI had that responsibility. Crisis management? That was Dick Clarke’s job. “[If] I needed to do anything,” she said, “I would have been asked to do it. I was not asked to do it.”
Also helpful was Joshua Kurlantzick’s description of Rice’s tenure.
Though the media have often portrayed the national-security adviser as a tough, decisive policy-maker, in reality Rice often has been a terrible mediator, creating fragmented, disunified policy. Ideally, a national-security adviser would firmly guide an internal administration debate toward an end point, present a policy recommendation to the president, and then force the administration to follow the president’s decision. “You’d think the NSC would lay down the law,” says one former official. “Condi did nothing … . If there was a strong national-security adviser who’d instill discipline, that would have stopped … debate.”
The Post added some important context to this as well.
Condoleezza Rice, who will be named as Colin L. Powell’s replacement as early as today, has forged an extraordinarily close relationship with President Bush. But, paradoxically, many experts consider her one of the weakest national security advisers in recent history in terms of managing interagency conflicts.
So, what do we know about our soon-to-be Secretary of State? She’s been wrong about the major foreign policy crises of our time, she has little use for reining in bureaucracy, she’s unwilling or unable to share pertinent information with relevant government officials, she shuns responsibility, and has proven inept at mediation and interagency cooperation.
Sounds perfect for the job, right? I feel better about the future of American foreign policy already.