Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story (29 page)

Condi knew that much of her message would not be popular with Russian officials, especially the plan to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which Bush and Rice consider an outdated relic of the Cold War. “We’ve always said that we believe that the ABM Treaty is not only a problem for the limitations it places on testing and evaluation, but it’s the wrong treaty for the wrong era,” Condi said in a press briefing before leaving for Moscow. “And it inculcates and hardens a hostile relationship that no longer exists. But we’ll talk to the Russians as to form. I think that’s part of the consultation that needs to go on.”

The primary purpose of the trip was to clarify which topics Bush and Putin would discuss and set up a rough timetable. Condi’s talks with Putin, Defense Minister Sergie Ivanov, and other officials helped set the tone for the arms talks to come, including the president’s meetings with Putin at the G-8 Summit in Italy that summer. At that meeting, the two presidents agreed to talk in the future about reducing their stockpiles.

The Russian press relished Condi’s appearance in Moscow, praising her “beautiful Russian” and gushing over her fondness for St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), where she spent a few weeks as a graduate student. Her meetings were covered extensively on television news and in the newspapers. When she returned to Washington, she remarked that Putin’s style was refreshingly different than that of his predecessors. “I’ve been in lots of meetings with Russian leaders and they tend to turn into an exchange of monologues,” she said. “[Putin] is much more conversational. He has a good sense of humor and loves to tell little jokes and stories.”

Working on the U.S.-Russian dialogue on missile defense is one of Condi’s primary assignments. In a summit held at Bush’s Texas ranch, both Bush and Putin agreed to major cuts in their nuclear arsenals, but they did not come to an agreement about revoking the ABM Treaty. They were upbeat throughout the three-day summit and expressed a warm regard for each other, but the treaty remained a thorny issue.

After September 11, the vital alliance between the two countries in fighting terrorism had an effect on the ongoing arms talks. The Bush administration went ahead with its plan to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, but this did not have a harmful effect on the historic arms reduction treaty Bush and Putin signed in the spring of 2002. Bush traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg for a summit with Putin in May, and the talks resulted in an agreement to “remove from deployment” two-thirds of each nation’s long-range nuclear missiles over a period of ten years. The United States officially withdrew from the ABM Treaty in June 2002. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz discussed the relevance of that step in
The Wall Street Journal
:

As a result of hard work and determination on both sides, relations with Russia—and between Russia and our NATO allies—are entering a new and promising era. Future U.S.-Russian summits will not be dominated by the question: What treaty are you planning to sign to regulate the nuclear balance of terror? Instead, we will focus on cooperating to meet the security challenges facing both our nations, the war on terrorism, and what we can do to enrich the lives of our peoples through closer economic, cultural, and political ties.

With her contributions to Bush’s missile defense agenda and her diligence in coordinating the massive amount of information coming into the National Security Council about the war on terrorism, Condi has struck a balance as an NSA who is both a highly visible policy operator and a manager. There are moments when familiar voices remind her of the effect that the constant threat of terrorism is having on everyone, such as the day she got a call from a friend in Birmingham. “Tell Aunt Condi what you’ve been saying,” she heard Deborah Carson say to someone near the phone. Deborah’s three-year-old son then got on the line and said, “Bin Laden is a bad man. You and the president are going to put Bin Laden in jail.” Condi laughed and said, “Joe, I’m going to tell President Bush first thing in the morning that you said that he was going to put Bin Laden in jail.”

As the search for Bin Laden continued, a congressional investigation began in Washington to try to uncover where the intelligence processing went wrong. When reports emerged in May 2002 that the Bush administration knew about a possible al Qaeda hijacking plot before it occurred in September 2001, Condi addressed the press to clarify what the government knew. “In the period starting in December 2000, the intelligence community started reporting increase in traffic concerning terrorist activities,” she said on May 16, 2002. “There was specific threat reporting about al Qaeda attacks against U.S. targets or interests that might be in the works.” She added that the possibility of hijackings were also included in the reports. “At the end of July,” she said, “the FAA issued another [communication] which said, ‘There’s no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil aviation interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution.’” She stressed that the consensus of the intelligence community was that an attack might occur against an American interest in a foreign country such as an embassy, but that they did not anticipate an incident on U.S. soil. “I want to reiterate,” she said, “that during this time the overwhelming bulk of the evidence was that this was an attack that was likely to take place overseas.” She also stated that no one expected American airliners to be used as suicide bombs. “I don’t think that anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon,” she said.

In addition to the ongoing investigation into the administration’s analysis of terrorist activities and the day-to-day events in the war on terrorism, the National Security Council held discussions on crises such as potential war between India and Pakistan, suicide attacks and escalating tensions in the Middle East, and a possible U.S. attack on Iraq during the first half of 2002. Trained as a Sovietologist, Condi had to broaden her knowledge of these regions to coordinate the Council’s recommendations on these and other global issues and bring various foreign policy opinions to the president.

After 9/11, the president’s weekend getaways at Camp David became primarily working trips. Condi has spent more weekends at Camp David than any other Bush advisor. She has also been a frequent guest at the Bush ranch in Crawford, the “Western White House,” for official business as well as socializing. Sometimes the informality of the ranch lends itself to fresh ideas, such as the day Condi sat around the kitchen table with Laura Bush and the president’s advisor Karen Hughes discussing the war in Afghanistan. There they came up with the idea of dropping food bundles to help alleviate the severe food shortages in the country. Their brainstorm turned into reality when the first bright yellow packages containing peanut butter, lentils, protein bars, and other items were dropped by American cargo jets in early October 2001.

In a speech given in early 2002, Condi summarized her feelings about the unifying effect of the 9/11 attacks, and her words reveal that her trademark optimism extends to her outlook on the nation’s future. They also confirm her parents’ influence throughout her life, an influence that strove to empower her to be a positive, driving force in the world:

We are committed to a world of greater trade, of greater democracy and greater human rights for all the world’s people wherever they live. September 11th makes this commitment more important, not less. Because . . . America stands for something real. It stands for rights that are inalienable and truths that are self-evident. It stands for compassion and hope. September 11th reintroduced America to a part of itself that some had forgotten or that some thought we no longer had. And we will carry this better part of ourselves out into the wider world.

The attacks of September 11th swept the nation into a new era, took America into a controversial war, and brought laser-like scrutiny to the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 terrorism policies. In addition to explaining the president’s policies as each event unfolded, Condi went before a historic investigatory commission to explain her own actions in the administration. The controversy surrounding the buildup to her public hearing was a story in itself, and ushered in perhaps the most turbulent phase of her career.

TEN

At War and Under Fire

“I know that, had we thought that there
was an attack coming in Washington or
New York, we would have moved
heaven and earth to try and stop it. And
I know that there was no single thing
that might have prevented that attack.”

—Condoleezza Rice, testifying before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004

BY
the summer of 2004, Condoleezza Rice’s role as President Bush’s closest advisor in the White House had elevated her to center stage in both U.S. politics and foreign policy.
Forbes
magazine affirmed this standing in August by naming her number one in its list of “The World’s Most Powerful Women.” The magazine announced that “advising the leader of the world’s largest superpower—and having the ear of leaders around the globe—makes Rice, 49, the most powerful woman in the world.”

Although Condi had become well known as one of the most visible national security advisors in history, the primary factor behind her increased global familiarity from 2002 onward has been the war in Iraq. As the Bush administration laid out its plans to continue the war against terrorism by using military force against Iraq, Condi continued to be the White House’s lead spokesperson by taking the president’s message to the media in news conferences as well as on the political talk show circuit.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other members of the administration had begun to make their case against Iraq in the spring of 2002. At a press conference on March 17, for example, Cheney voiced concerns over Iraq’s weapon stockpiles and potential nuclear capabilities:

The President’s made it clear that we are concerned about nations such as Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction. . . . We know they have biological and chemical weapons. . . . And we also have reason to believe they’re pursing the acquisition of nuclear weapons. That’s a concern to the United States. We think it’s of concern to people all over the region. And we think it’s important that we find a way to deal with that emerging threat.

The following August, Condi spelled out the president’s perspective on Saddam Hussein in a widely quoted BBC interview. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, she stated that the Iraqi leader “is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc again on his own population, his neighbors and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, on all of us.” Her argument stressed that there was a “very powerful moral case” for removing Hussein from power, based on lessons from history. The United States was justified in considering a preemptive strike, she explained, in that:

History is littered with cases of inaction that led to very grave consequences for the world. We just have to look back and ask how many dictators who end up being a tremendous global threat, and killing thousands, and indeed millions of people, should we have stopped in their tracks.

In the interview, part of the BBC’s September 11 anniversary radio series entitled “With Us or Against Us,” Condi reiterated the administration’s message that Hussein had “developed biological weapons [and] lied to the UN repeatedly about the stockpiles.”

Among the critics of the administration’s preemptive strategy was Condi’s mentor Brent Scowcroft, who had served as George H. W. Bush’s national security advisor and brought Condi into that administration as an expert in Soviet and Eastern European affairs. In an opinion piece published in the
Wall Street Journal
on the same day of Condi’s BBC interview, Scowcroft warned that military action in Iraq would divert the United States from its war on terrorism, isolate us from the global community that did not support such a strike, and destabilize the Middle East. “There is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the September 11 attacks,” Scowcroft wrote. By focusing on Iraq, he stated, the president undermined the country’s “pre-eminent security priority” of the war on terrorism and unraveled the global support that had developed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. “An attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counter-terrorist campaign we have undertaken,” he stated.

Scowcroft believed that launching a war in Iraq would not only divert the country from the war on terrorism but, if undertaken without America’s traditional allies, be far too costly:

There is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time. So long as that sentiment persists, it would require the U.S. to pursue a virtual go-it-alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive. The most serious cost, however, would be to the war on terrorism. Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence.