I just had to explain who Condoleezza Rice is to some poor fellow under the impression that she is some kind of model American who served her country well. Here’s my corrective, taking us back to those innocent “pre-fascist” days when the U.S. invaded Iraq on the basis of a bunch of cynically concocted hooey…
With respect, as NSA and as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice was in the inner circle of a neoconservative cabal executing that faction’s long-articulated policy of regime-change in Iraq — requiring a U.S. military presence in Iraq even in the event that Saddam Hussein abdicated and left the country or was assassinated. As Gen. Wesley Clark described in detail, the neocons made clear in late 2001 their plans to invade/effect regime-change in seven Muslim nations in the coming years (all of which the U.S. is presently bombing or supporting coups in).
Bob Woodward’s series of “Bush at War” books corroborates what’s been written elsewhere by Pulitzer-winning journalists: the agenda was regime-change, “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney were at the heart of the propaganda machine, along with Karl Rove and a few others.
Not only were they distorting intelligence as public cheerleaders for the invasion — of a helpless nation that had not attacked us and posed no threat — they were regularly visiting CIA analysts in order to pressure them to cherry-pick and skew the intelligence. The New York Times and Washington Post reported their extraordinary conduct as a virtual war with the CIA, with politicos leaning on analysts in order to manufacture a bogus case for war.
And we should never forget: We’re talking about a case for war that was being consciously manufactured and debunked in real-time. Colin Powell disgustedly threw out a great deal of the “case for war” speech that the Bushies, including Rice, wanted him to present to the United Nations, referring to it as “shit.” Furthermore, DCI George Tenet never actually told Dubya that the case for war was “a slam dunk,” rather he said that it would be a “slam dunk” to repackage their doubt-plagued and largely fabricated case in a way that would make it more marketable to the public: “Put some lipstick on this pig, boss? That’s a slam dunk!”
Condoleezza Rice was chief among those who disregarded the conclusions of the experts, including our best nuclear weapons experts (those at the Energy Department) who told the Bush warmongers that Saddam’s aluminum tubes were undoubtedly for conventional rockets — and very ill-suited for the “mushroom cloud” producing weapon the administration kept threatening us with. Like the “yellowcake” uranium story, it was a 100% manufactured claim, an obvious forgery.
As has been documented in a number of highly acclaimed books on the subject, Rice stuck with Bush/Cheney and their whole genocidal neocon enterprise every systemically-torturing, mass-murdering, election-rigging, assassinating, slave-employing, chemical weapon-using, journalist-murdering step of the way.
If there were any justice in this world, Condoleezza Rice would be at The Hague, along with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama (whose crimes you probably are equally ignorant of).
BUT HERE IS THE PLAIN TRUTH: Millions of Iraqis were murdered by President Clinton and George Bush, between draconian, potable water-denying sanctions and the U.S. war of aggression (the most heinous war crime of all, under the Nuremberg Principles). That is what the history shows.
And we need to be cognizant of that history — not bury it alive, as our major law enforcement, political, and journalistic institutions have tried to do. Because as James Baldwin and Martin Luther King warned us, our silence toward injustice is something that threatens us all, endangering the nation, as it does our souls. There are no victors when heinous crimes go unacknowledged.
And the survivors are dead inside.