I wasn't as impressed as you and John with the Rice profile. I mean, it's long and detailed and dependable, sure, but I thought it had two key problems.
The first is that it didn't really have anything to say about what substantive role she plays in crafting the administration's foreign policy, largely because she won't say what she tells Dubya and there's no real gossip out there about it. So who knows just what influence, if any, she is actually having, and for what? Can you really tell me, on the basis of that article, how American foreign policy is different thanks to Condi Rice's being NSA rather than somebody else?
Second, the one thing the article does bring out is her apparently radical shift, once in office, from something resembling a "realist" position to something resembling a "neocon" one. This would seem to be evidence in the opposite direction--against her having much independent influence, and in favor of her just being a mirror of her boss and the powerful people around her (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.).
Many of us in the field expected her to play a different role in the admin, essentially as something of an ally of Powell. It would seem that she has not, in fact, done that (I say "seem" because we just don't know what the internal deliberations are). There has been much speculation, accordingly, as to why. Four kinds of answers have been suggested. The first is that she was always harder line and more conservative than some of us thought. The second is that she's extremely ambitious, understands the balance of power inside the administration, and maneuvers carefully to make sure she's on the winning side, whatever that is. The third is that she offers Powell-like advice in private, but we never hear it. And the fourth is that she did indeed have some kind of epiphany after 9/11 that changed her view of the world.
I would have liked the piece to spend a little less time on what she was wearing in her early childhood piano performances and a little more on pushing the question of just what impact she has had in the administration and why--even though those are obviously topics that are very hard to get at.
tb@sniffsniff.com |
