Condi Rice trying to rewrite history for the next couple of months

November 12, 2008
Say What?!
Posted by Warren Strobel
McClatchy blog

The Bush administration will soon be history, but that hasn't stopped its senior members from trying to rewrite history for the next couple of months ... and no doubt, long after.

We were watching a video of CSPAN's interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when we had to suddenly stop and hit the rewind button. Rice said this, and we quote:

When I go to Europe, I no longer see any difference in the view that a stable and secure Iraq is in everybody’s interest, and that an Iraq that is democratic and in which Saddam Hussein, that brutal monster that caused three wars in the region, including dragging us in twice, that used " who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people, that an Iraq that is democratic and friendly to the West is better for the Middle East. I don’t see much disagreement about that.

Dragging us in twice?

Pause. Think about that.

I mean, everyone--or most everyone--agrees that former President George H.W. Bush had to respond after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and threatened to go further south, into the Saudi oil fields. That's once. I suppose it's possible that by "twice," Rice was referring to U.S. involvement in the Iran-Iraq war, when the United States reflagged Kuwaiti tankers to protect them from threats to shipping, and got involved in various other ways (including by suppling intel to our-then friend Saddam Hussein to help him fight Iran).

But it seems more likely that Rice was arguing that Saddam "dragged us in" to the Iraq War. That's not our memory here at Nukes and Spooks. In fact, the record is now clear (as we reported at the time) that President George W. Bush had decided to go to war against Iraq in early 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks. Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction or significant, operational ties to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. The Bush administration dismissed Saddam's accounting of his WMD, ignored offers of mediation, and used bogus and false intelligence to make the case for war. It didn't let the U.N. Security Council or opposition from Europeans get in the way. All that makes for an odd definition of "dragging us in."

Elsewhere, in the interview, Rice acknowledges mistakes in the Iraq War, while arguing the Bush administration eventually learned from them:

There are a lot of things that could have been done differently. I think that it took awhile to really understand how to help a country that was really completely destroyed in its fabric, not just its institutions, but the fabric of society by the years of tyranny under Saddam Hussein and how to help it recover. In retrospect, we did a lot from Baghdad, a lot from the top down. The provinces and the tribes were clearly part of the answer. And it took a while to recognize that the complete integration of the civilian and military effort through the Provincial Reconstruction Teams would empower the provinces to create friends, for instance, the sons of Iraq and Anbar, who would then themselves with our help expel al-Qaida.

Rice said she will return to Stanford after Jan. 20, where she will write a book about American foreign policy--doesn't sound like a kiss-and-tell-type tome to us--and one about her late parents, John and Angelena, whom she called "educational evangelists."

Striking a theme that has been present in many of her recent speeches, and perhaps providing a hint of her future activities, RIce said education is an important national security issue:

If I am concerned about one core issue for America, we’ll get through the many challenges and difficulties that we have, but the state of education in this country is a challenge that we better meet, and we’d better meet it soon.

It would be mean, very mean, of us to suggest that a proper accounting of history, even recent history, is a critical ingredient of a good education.