Blumenthal: Shuttle without diplomacy

[kskiska]

After signaling support for James Baker's Iraq proposals, Condi caved and stood faithfully by the president's failing policies -- assuring her irrelevance, and that of the State Department.

By Sidney Blumenthal

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With the knowledge of the elder Bush and Baker, Scowcroft traveled to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, broaching his ideas to President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah. They told him they were fully supportive and prepared to step forward, but were skeptical that Rice or Bush would embrace Scowcroft's program. Meanwhile, Scowcroft and Baker began reassembling the elder Bush's national security team, using the Iraq Study Group as a mobilizing tool. They saw this as a last chance to save the Bush presidency, which was indelibly tainting the father's legacy, and replace neoconservatism with foreign policy realism.

At the end of August 2006, Scowcroft briefed Rice, according to a national security official close to Scowcroft. She seemed to concur with his views and asked him, "How are we going to present this to the president?" "Not we," replied Scowcroft. "You." She appeared taken aback, but he emphasized that she was the only one who could induce Bush to change his policies. Thus Rice became the linchpin for Scowcroft's and Baker's plans.

Rice now confronted the biggest quandary of her career. On one side were the authorities that had shaped her foreign policy experience, not only Scowcroft and Baker but also, as she well knew, the looming shadow of Bush's father. On the other was the president, who had raised her into Baker's seventh-floor office in Foggy Bottom, whom she had flattered as the equal of Lincoln and Churchill, and whom, in a telling Freudian slip, she had referred to as "my husband" before a roomful of reporters and editors of the New York Times. Throughout the run-up to the invasion of Iraq and afterward Rice had been Bush's enabler. It was because Scowcroft understood her special relationship that he sought to win her over.

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Nine days after Zelikow's resignation the Iraq Study Group report was released. Informed correspondents of the Washington Post and New York Times related in conversation that Bush furiously called the report "a flaming turd," but his colorful remark was not published. Perhaps it was apocryphal. Nonetheless, it conveyed the intensity of his hostile rejection. Still, Scowcroft and Baker, like Vladimir and Estragon in "Waiting for Godot," waited for Rice.

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/01/10/condi_rice/