Condi Rice's Exit Interview

In yesterday's NYT Magazine, the cover story was a several page exit interview with Condi Rice and several other Bush folks. One of my advisers advised Rice when she was at Denver, and has always said nice things about her. Generally speaking, she has always seemed like a sharp National Security Advisor and Sec of State, but that's not to say I think she's been the best or could have been more forceful. Her advocacy for the Israel-Lebanon war in '06 and the necessity of chaos to revise the status quo ante (which she repeated numerous times during and after the war), was wrong and Lebanese children must still be mindful of potential left-over cluster bombs.

I should say that her closing comments on immigration were appealing. But her remarks on democracy and the Middle East as well as Bush's prescience seem inflated and wrong. When Hamas won a significant democratic victory in 2006, the Bush admin revealed its hypocritical nature by working to undermine that progress and overturning a democratic election. Similarly, the Bush admin pushed for greater reforms in Egyptian electoral politics, only to backtrack and push Egypt to rollback greater freedoms when the Muslim Brotherhood (al ikhwan al islamiyya) triumphed at the polls. Ultimately, the Bush administration wanted democracy but only for those they deemed worthy and who weren't Islamists. The Bush admin pushed a American normative vision of what democracy means and who should be elected. In other words, it's democracy as we want and say.

Under the header "The Past and Future of the Bush Agenda," she addressed Bush's legacy in an odd and almost fawning manner:

"Bush deserves credit for recognizing that the terms were now going to be set for the next big historical evolution. The president recognized that freedom was something that was not just desirable but essential for the US; that it means not just freedom from tyranny but also freedom from disease, and poverty. And that if you were going to have democratic leaders, they had to be able to deliver for their people....And linking up the great compassion of the US with our security interests. Making it about democracy, defense, and development."

Really, that was Bush's breakthrough? First off, I'm glad he realizes people like freedom, but he directed a foreign policy on delivering democracy at the point of a gun or through strangling sanctions. She goes on to say that Bush deserves credit for the Millenium Challenge initiative and pouring money into Africa (which he does), but her comments make it seem like that was a break through. Maybe time will show that it is, but I struggle to see how it's much more than him pushing an agenda rather than a sweeping realignment of foreign policy. And for what it's worth, Bush's money drive for Africa should be tempered with the fact that condoms weren't considered the first priority (abstinence and monogamy were) and defense money bolstered the rather large sums given to African nations. As I said in a previous post about Ethiopia, defense tools and money doesn't always make the region better.