Exclusive: Key Republicans object to Susan Rice getting a promotion
from UN ambassador to Secretary of State, citing her flawed account of
the Benghazi assault. But a more legitimate concern is her lack of
judgment on the Iraq War and other foreign policy decisions, says
ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
President Barack Obama should ditch the idea of nominating U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice to be the next Secretary of State on
substantive grounds, not because she may have – knowingly or not –
fudged the truth about the attack on the poorly guarded CIA
installation in Benghazi, Libya.
Rice’s biggest disqualification is the fact that she has shown little
willingness to challenge the frequently wrongheaded conventional
wisdom of Official Washington, including on the critical question of
invading Iraq in 2003. At that pivotal moment, Rice essentially went
with the flow, rather than standing up for the principles of
international law or exposing the pro-war deceptions.
In fall 2002, as President George W. Bush and his administration were
pounding the drums for war, Rice wasn’t exactly a profile in courage.
A senior fellow at the centrist Brookings Institution, she echoed the
neoconservative demands for “regime change” in Iraq and doubted the
“need [for] a further [U.N. Security] Council resolution before we can
enforce this and previous resolutions” on Iraq, according a
compilation of her Iraq War comments compiled by the Institute for
Public Accuracy.
In an NPR interview on Dec. 20, 2002, Rice joined the bellicose
chorus, declaring: “It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It’s
clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with
forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on. I think the question becomes
whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any,
even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side.”
Rice also was wowed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s deceptive
speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. The next day, again on
NPR, Rice said, “I think he has proved that Iraq has these weapons and
is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.”
After the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, Rice foresaw an open-ended
U.S. occupation of Iraq. In a Washington Post online forum, she
declared, ““To maximize our likelihood of success, the US is going to
have to remain committed to and focused on reconstruction and
rehabilitation of Iraq for many years to come. This administration and
future ones will need to demonstrate a longer attention span than we
have in Afghanistan, and we will have to embrace rather than evade the
essential tasks of peacekeeping and nation building.”
Only later, when the Iraq War began going badly and especially after
she became an adviser to Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign,
did Rice take a less hawkish position. She opposed President Bush’s
troop “surge” in 2007, a stance in line with Obama’s anti-Iraq War
posture. During Campaign 2008, she also mocked one of Sen. John
McCain’s trips to the Baghdad as “strolling around the market in a
flak jacket.”
The Ambitious Staffer
In other words, Rice fits the mold more of an ambitious staffer – ever
mindful of the safe boundaries for permissible thought in Official
Washington and eager to serve one’s political patron – than of a
courageous foreign policy thinker who can see around the corners to
spot the actual threats looming for the United States and the world.
Though Rice’s defenders might say there is nothing unusual in an
aspiring foreign policy operative following the consensus or the
instructions of a superior, there are plenty of troubling examples of
innocent people getting killed when careerism overwhelmed wisdom and
judgment. For instance, in 2003, CIA Director George Tenet, a
malleable former congressional staffer, helped pave the way for the
disastrous Iraq War.
Ironically, Rice’s eagerness to play the Washington game also landed
her in the middle of the current “scandal” over her statements
regarding the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi
which left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher
Stevens.
On Sept. 16, Rice appeared on five (count them) Sunday TV shows,
adhering closely to the CIA-provided “talking points,” which cited the
likelihood of a spontaneous protest preceding the violent assault but
which alluded to the tenuousness of the evidence available at the
time.
Blinded by the limelight, Rice seems to have blundered into the
controversy, giving little thought to the possibility that she was
being put out front by then-CIA Director David Petraeus and Obama’s
counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, who is the usual
administration spokesman regarding terrorist attacks. Brennan
immediately flew off to Libya on a fact-finding trip, leaving Rice in
the unaccustomed role of ‘splaining the attack in Benghazi.
Rice also wasn’t overly curious as to why Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton begged off on grounds she was “not going to offer any
hypothetical explanations.”
Was Ambassador Rice too ambitious and/or too naïve? For her it is a
cruel irony that by letting her vision be blurred by the allure of
five sets of klieg lights in one day, and the opportunity to embellish
her persona for the top job at State, she has imperiled her own
candidacy.
Loyal functionaries like Rice, with a penchant for doing whatever they
are told do not expect to be mouse-trapped by their colleagues. But,
if you can’t see that kind of thing coming – particularly when folks
like Brennan and Petraeus are involved – you should not expect to
become Secretary of State.
Understanding Benghazi
It also might have been smart for Rice to have taken the trouble to
learn what U.S. officials were doing in Benghazi. Did she know that,
as House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has revealed, that the word
“consulate” in the draft “talking points” was carefully changed to
“mission.”
A prospective Secretary of State should know the difference. A
“mission” is a group of officials abroad normally headed by a diplomat
while a consulate is headed by a consul who normally handles
commercial interests, serves the needs of citizens abroad and issues
visas.
The difference between consulate and mission is more than semantic.
Consulates, understandably, perform consular duties. Missions can do
whatever. As my former CIA analyst colleague, Melvin A. Goodman
pointed out in “The Why Behind the Benghazi Attack,” the hidden
reality in Benghazi was not the alleged deception by Rice or the
inadequate security measures.
The key secret was that the U.S. government had transformed the
Benghazi “mission” into an operational CIA base spying on and seeking
to neutralize extremist militias operating in eastern Libya. Thus, the
“mission” was an inviting target for attack. In a limited sense, one
could say the primary security failure was in not adequately
anticipating this risk.
The more significant point is that, because of the anger resulting
from U.S. policy in the area and the CIA role in implementing it,
there is great doubt that “missions” like the one in Benghazi can ever
be protected from the kind of organized assault launched on Sept. 11,
2012. And that probably includes gigantic, fortified installations
like the U.S. embassies in Baghdad and Kabul.
A month before the U.S. presidential election, House Government
Affairs Committee chair Rep. Darrell Issa, R-California, conducted a
public hearing, in an attempt to prove that with adequate security
measures the attack on the Benghazi “mission” could have been thwarted
and American lives saved.
Issa’s star witness, State Department Regional Security Officer Eric
Nordstrom, joined others in bemoaning State’s refusal to provide
additional security (partly due to congressional refusal to
appropriate all the requested funds).
But Nordstrom shot a wide hole in the notion that more security could
have saved the day. A 14-year veteran of State’s Diplomatic Security
Service, Nordstrom said the kind of attack mounted in Benghazi could
not have been prevented.
“Having an extra foot of wall, or an extra half-dozen guards or agents
would not have enabled us to respond to that kind of assault,”
Nordstrom said. “The ferocity and intensity of the attack was nothing
that we had seen in Libya, or that I had seen in my time in the
Diplomatic Security Service.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Real
Blame for Deaths in Libya.”]
Whether media pundits are conscious of this or not, the interminable
focus on what Susan Rice said and when she said it, as well as the
inadequate security, divert attention from what the CIA was doing in
Benghazi. No Establishment figure or media pundit wants to focus on
that. And, as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, recently
conceded, no politician wants to risk appearing reluctant to support
covert action against “terrorism.”
But a source with excellent access, so to speak, to former CIA
Director David Petraeus, his biographer/mistress Paula Broadwell, said
publicly on Oct. 26 that CIA was interrogating prisoners in Benghazi
and that this may have been the reason the CIA base was so brutally
attacked. More bizarre still, her comments were corroborated by Fox
News!
If Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham were genuinely interested in
what happened in Benghazi and why, would they not wish to look into
that?
A C-Minus on Substance
President Obama has defended Rice against those who would “besmirch”
her reputation, saying she “has done exemplary work. She has
represented the United States and our interests in the United Nations
with skill, professionalism, and toughness, and grace.”
Obama also said she had “nothing to do with Benghazi.” However, this
does not appear to be entirely accurate. It is an open secret that
Susan Rice, together with Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, now
ensconced at Obama’s National Security Council, were big promoters of
the so-called “responsibility to protect” and thus acted as prime
movers behind the U.S. excellent adventure in Libya.
The charitable explanation is that last year, with a thoroughly naïve
“Gaddafi-bad-guys-vs.-maybe-good-guys” approach, blissfully unaware of
which elements they might be “protecting” or “liberating” in Benghazi,
and with little planning regarding who might replace Gaddafi, they
made their mark on Libya.
Are we to believe that they gave not a thought to the imperative felt
by key NATO partners to exploit the fledgling “Libyan Arab spring” to
ensure the continuing flow of high-grade crude? And did none of them
take any lessons from the excellent adventure of going into Iraq with
no serious plan for what might come next?
As for Ambassador Rice, as some have suggested, her judgment may be
compromised by well-deserved guilt at having done nothing to stop the
killing of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994 when she was White House referent
for African affairs at the NSC under President Bill Clinton and
acquiesced in his reluctance to call genocide “genocide.”
This presumably was why, when President Bill Clinton nominated Susan
Rice to be Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in 1997,
the Congressional Black Caucus objected to the nomination, citing her
membership in “Washington’s assimilationist black elite.”
The caucus got that right. Susan Rice has moved up the ladder by
demonstrating an uncanny ability to ignore the interests of the
oppressed – black or brown – whether in Rwanda or in Gaza. Her
selective judgment on when to intervene in a foreign crisis normally
follows the conventional wisdom of Official Washington, such as with
Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.
Ignoring Palestine’s Plight
Thus, her empathy for the “good guys” (whoever they may be) in Libya
does not extend to the Palestinians. Like other myopic policymakers
and spokespersons, Rice ignores the misery in Gaza and the West Bank
because to do otherwise would cast her outside Official Washington’s
perceived wisdom, which holds that no smart politician or pundit
confronts Israel too directly or too frequently.
However, the fact that last Thursday the United States could muster
only eight votes (beside its own), from the 193 member states of the
General Assembly, to oppose giving Palestine the status of non-member
observer state is surely a harbinger of defeats to come on this key
issue.
Rice’s one-sided defense of Israel as it pummeled the defenseless
Gazans last month was not only unconscionable, but in the long run
counterproductive – not only for the U.S. but for Israel. Granted,
Rice was speaking for the Obama administration but there are no
indications that she has used her influence with the President to
reshape U.S. policy significantly.
Her failure to dissent, which would surely undo her careful
construction of a Washington career, continues even as Israeli
Interior Minister Eli Yashai has acknowledged that Israel’s goal was
to “send Gaza back to the Middle Ages” and other Israeli officials
casually liken their periodic bloodletting in Gaza to “mowing the
grass.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Likening Palestinians to Blades of
Grass.”]
Washington’s public support for the carnage no doubt has left Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a sense of invulnerability even
in the face of the stinging vote in the U.N. Thus, he retaliated for
the U.N.’s affront by authoring 3,000 new homes for Jewish settlers
and plans for thousands more in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
On Friday, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor replied lamely, “We
reiterate our longstanding opposition to settlement activity and East
Jerusalem construction and announcements.”
As the Biblical advice states: By their fruits shall you know them. So
look at the fruits of Rice’s policymaking, including her one-sided
defense of Israel before a world audience increasingly aware of U.S.
hypocrisy, particularly on the key issue of Palestine.
It can surely be assumed that Susan Rice is intelligent enough to
understand the moral depravity of U.S. policy on Palestine. Then why
does she fall so easily in with extreme pro-Israel hawks and neocons
on such issues? Presumably, she understands that such positioning is
how to get ahead.
In playing for support from her fellow hawks, Rice remains the
ambitious staffer more than the wise diplomat. And like an ambitious
staffer, she senses that hawkishness is usually a safer career path
than thoughtful diplomacy. This is not the kind of person anyone
should want as Secretary of State.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the
ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He served
as an Army officer and then a CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and
now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
Received on Sun Dec 09 2012 - 21:02:31 EST
