Rice catching more flak over U.S. policy

Rice catching more flak over U.S. policy
By Helene Cooper
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: February 4, 2007

WASHINGTON: For six years, first as national security adviser and then as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice worked under the cover of a very effective shield: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was during that time the administration's lightning rod for criticism over its handling of Iraq.

But in recent weeks, with Rumsfeld gone, Rice has faced increased, and somewhat unfamiliar, criticism. At a Senate hearing on Jan. 11, she confronted a wall of opposition from Republicans as well as Democrats. During three days of hearings last week on Iraq, several of her predecessors were pointed in their disapproval of her job performance.

Former Secretary of State James Baker took issue with Rice's refusal to engage Syria diplomatically. Back in his day, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "we practiced diplomacy full time, and it paid off."

Last week, Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, released three letters demanding that Rice make public the administration's requirements for actions to be taken by the Iraqi government to earn continued U.S. support. Along with the letters, and Rice's reply — which indicated that the Iraqis had already missed most of the benchmarks — the senators also released an irate statement.

"Secretary Rice finally provided a response" to the senators' repeated requests, the statement said. "What Secretary Rice's letter makes abundantly clear is that the administration does not intend to attach meaningful consequences for the Iraqis continuing to fail to meet their commitments."

Despite her role at the heart of the Iraq war from its beginnings, Rice had, thus far, avoided the public pillorying that Rumsfeld received. She has repeatedly had the highest approval ratings of anyone in the administration, and she continues to earn approval ratings that are substantially higher than her boss's.

But as the Bush administration's overall foreign policy has come under fire, and other senior officials have left the administration, Rice is starting to take the heat previously reserved for Rumsfeld.

"Before, nobody assigned her the kind of ownership or authorship over the administration's policy — she did get something of a pass," said Michael McFaul, a political science professor at Stanford who knows Rice. "Now, there aren't that many officials still around, and she's much more exposed."

Kenneth Pollack, a research director at the Brookings Institution, said: "It is no longer the case that Rumsfeld is the administration bad guy. People will look much harder at Condi's role now, and Iraq is really going to rest on her shoulders."

In the past, most of the criticism came from the left. But now the disapproval has spread, and Republicans are joining in. The starkest example came on Jan. 11, when Rice faced a roomful of skeptics as she defended, before a Senate panel, President George W. Bush's new Iraq strategy. "You're going to have to do a much better job" explaining the rationale for the war, Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, told her, adding that the administration could no longer count on his support.

The censure continued last week during three days of rare Senate testimony from a cadre of Rice's predecessors. While the former secretaries of state and national security advisers — Baker, Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski — were diplomatic in their critiques of the administration's foreign policy, all left the impression that as America's top diplomat, Rice was not engaging in real diplomacy.

"That's what we hire a secretary of state for, not to sit there and proclaim categorical statements, but to engage in the process," said Brzezinski, who was national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter.