Abbas weak… Road Map a dead-end Rice failed to fix own mess

In her two years as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice has had limited success in her efforts to fix the US diplomatic setbacks she helped create during President George W. Bush’s first term, says a new book on the chief US diplomat. As Bush’s national security advisor during his first term, Rice was at the center of decisions that she has struggled to mend since becoming secretary of state in January 2005, journalist Glenn Kessler writes in “The Confidante.” “She was one of the weakest national security advisors in US history. Her inexperience and her mistakes in that job have shaped the world and colored the choices she must handle as secretary of state,” writes Kessler, who covers US diplomacy for The Washington Post. “The invasion of Iraq, the missed opportunity with Iran, the breach in relations with Europe, the Arab anger at a perceived bias against the Palestinians – all of these problems were the direct result of decisions she helped make in the White House,” he writes.

“Now, as secretary of state, she tried mightily – and with limited success – to unravel the Gordian knots she tied in in George W. Bush’s first term.” Rice, the first black woman to hold the top US diplomat job, was a Bush administration star when she became secretary of state. But her star has since faded and she now has a mere 18 months left – Bush’s second and final four-year term ends in January 2009 – to improve the legacy she will leave for the history books. “As President Bush’s confidante for more than seven years, Rice has failed to provide him with a coherent foreign policy vision,” writes Kessler in the book to be released this week in the United States. In two years, Rice has faced several setbacks. The foreign policy failures under Rice’s watch include the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon in mid-2006, which “may have marked an ominous turning point – the decline of American power in the region,” Kessler writes.

The author also points to North Korea’s nuclear tests in October 2006, which he says the Bush administration could have avoided, and the long stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Rice has also never been personally engaged in efforts to end the humanitarian tragedy in Sudan’s war-torn region of Darfur, Kessler writes. One of her few bright spots is the US nuclear deal with India, which was negotiated soon after she took the job and still needs to be finalized.

Rice
Rice thought Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was a weak disappointment, and she once judged Bush’s signature Mideast peace program unworkable, according to the biography. Months into her term as secretary of state in 2005, Rice considered Abbas “a nice man but ineffective,” and she worried Abbas was unworthy of the investment in trust and money the US had placed in him, the book says. At the time, Bush and Rice were publicly trying to bolster Abbas as the more palatable alternative to the late Yasser Arafat. Despite qualms about Abbas, the administration hoped that Bush’s second term might see gains in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The book quotes her, however, as assessing the roadmap plan very harshly in 2003 when she was Bush’s national security adviser. “The road map is at best a marginal plan. It doesn’t work,” the book quotes Rice as telling an Israeli counterpart. The book quotes Bush as calling Abbas predecessor, Yasser Arafat, “a loser” on whom Bush was unwilling to waste political capital.

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