Why should Susan Rice not be nominated to succeed Hillary
Clinton as Secretary of State? The president trusts and admires
her. Why should Republicans make an issue of her? Do they want to
remind the American people once again they are sore losers?
The president has every reason to choose his own cabinet. What
is he supposed to do — favor his opponents? Policy-making is
inherently political, it grows out of political choices that voters
approve or reject. So what is the problem? We get the government we
deserve through a free and fair process that we claim other nations
should emulate.
The opposition to Susan Rice is based on her alleged
participation in the way the Administration handled the Benghazi
affair. Are Republicans afraid to attack the president and his
secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton? They would then have to explain
what they think might have been done differently. Whose idea was it
to bring a democratic revolution into the umma? Judging
from the recent campaign, however, the Republicans are as clueless
as the rest of us regarding what is going on in the dar al
islam and what, if anything, we can do about it. So they take
out their frustrations on an ambitious young lady who reportedly is
smart (Oxford PhD), fast (basketball point guard), and rich as a
one-percent person (personal fortune larger than some nations’
GNP.).
Unless we want to ax the entire foreign policy high command
every time there is a debacle overseas, it is difficult to see why
some mistakes of interpretation, which she has since retracted,
should stymie Mrs. Rice’s career, particularly since all she did
was to repeat was she was told to say. The president explained that
she had nothing to do with what happened in Benghazi and could not
have known, on her own, what went wrong.
Ours is not a parliamentary democracy and ministers —
secretaries — do not resign the way they do in many other
countries, as fall guys when something goes badly wrong. In certain
cases the entire government falls because the failure is so
egregious the parliament loses all confidence in its ability to
govern. By attacking Mrs. Rice, do Republicans really think they
are demonstrating wisdom and virtue in matters of governance
greater than the Democrats’?
We sometimes accept the practice of asking secretaries or other
high officials to resign because their conduct of policy or their
personal behavior is so shabby that their mere presence in the
stratosphere of government becomes a demoralizing liability. Mrs.
Rice is no Sumner Welles or Walter Jenkins, though surely it says
something about the times we live in that, diversity
obligé, a Welles or a Jenkins today would not be forced to
resign, though the same indulgence is not shown a David Petraeus.
Well, who is better at the top of things in defending our Republic
— David Petraeus or Susan Rice? If the Republicans cannot say, the
bullying of Susan Rice makes them appear a bunch of sissies and
prudes.
By various accounts, Amb. Rice, who was on the staff of the
National Security Council in the first Clinton administration and
served as Asst. Secretary of State for African Affairs in the
second, in 1994 recommended against calling the mass murder of
Tutsi in Rwanda a genocide because if it was in fact a genocide and
the administration did not intervene, it would hurt the Democrats
“in November.” They took a hit in the mid-terms anyway, as voters
recoiled from their economic policies including a proposed national
health service designed largely by Mrs. Clinton.
The Republicans, then led by the ebullient idea-a-minute Newt
Gingrich, did not make the Rwandan horror an issue during those
midterms. Are they in a position to criticize the alleged cynicism
of a young staffer and her boss, the macho Sandy Berger
whose career crashed when he admitted to unauthorized possession of
state secrets? What did the Republicans do for Rwanda? Should
Condoleezza Rice have been blocked in her appointment as Secretary
of State because when she was on the NSC staff she did not, as far
as anyone knows, stick her neck out for the Kurds in the aftermath
of the first Gulf War?
A couple years after the Rwanda hands-off policy, Susan Rice,
according to contemporary and retrospective accounts, argued
against putting pressure on the government of Omar el-Bashir in
Sudan to turn over their alleged guest, Osama Bin Laden, already
known in international security circles as a bankroller and
mastermind of revolutionary war against Western nations and
allegedly apostate Arab regimes. Notwithstanding her vow to “go
down in flames” to prevent another genocide, she seems to have come
down against intervention in Sudan, and it fell to Mr. Clinton’s
successor, G. W. Bush, to help extricate the south Sudanese from
the depredations of the Khartoum regime by brokering the deal
opening the way to an independent south. The Obama administration
did not follow up with particularly notable efforts to help the
fledgling country, apart from providing some military advisory
missions growing out of long-term plans that were already in place.
Nor did it make any progress, notwithstanding Mrs. Rice’s high
position in the administration’s councils on Africa, in the rolling
massacres in Darfur, Sudan’s western province, or eastern
Congo.
This may be viewed as poor judgment. Why take out Moammar
Gaddafi, as the Obama administration chose to do in 2011,
reportedly with Susan Rice’s encouragement, but not Bashir?
However, the Republicans did not say it was poor judgment.
Possibly Mrs. Rice, notwithstanding the lessons she drew from
the Rwanda civil war, did not anticipate the consequences of
enabling the Anglo-French in their campaign against the Tripolitan
pirate. Perhaps knocking him off was worth the consequences;
opinion was divided, with some Republicans and conservatives
expressing reservations about the campaign and others, such as the
latter-day Lydell Hart Max Boot, saying it would be easy (echoing
the “cakewalk” comment on going into Iraq in 2003). But if memory
serves, no one, pro or con, gave any thought to Mali and its
neighbors.
If the Republicans have a problem with the President’s foreign
policy, they should say so forthrightly and call him to accounts.
During the campaign, they chose not make Mr. Obama’s foreign policy
a campaign issue. The failure to anticipate the attack on our
consulate at Benghazi, the incoherent explanations of what
happened, the apparently total disregard for the consequences of
our Libya policy on the countries of the Sahel, notably Mali —
half of which was conquered by rebels assisted by jihadists who had
recovered Gaddafi’s arsenals — all these questions and many more
could have been raised in the wake of the failure at Benghazi.
The Republicans did not raise them, however. They have tried to
raise issues of intellectual (or even moral) judgment, as
Bret Stephens does, relying heavily on a critical examination
of her Clinton period by Columbia professor Peter Rosenblum. He
quotes Prof. Rosenblum to the effect that “Susan Rice seems not to
have convinced colleagues that her real interest was Africa, or
even foreign policy.” This is surely interesting, but, even if it
is so, how does it disqualify her?
Instead of getting serious about foreign policy, Republicans are
now complaining about Mrs. Rice’s investments in the oil industry.
Are they envious that she is a true one percent lady, with a
personal fortune between $23 million and $43 million, according to
the Center for Responsive Politics, a liberal think thank. If they
think it is wrong to invest in the energy sector, why did they not
mention it during the campaign? If they think it is okay, they
could have criticized the president for campaigning against “the
rich” while taking the advice of one of them in political and
policy matters.
In the great lakes region of east Africa, it is said that when
elephants fight, the grass is crushed. When Republicans are
incoherent and flail about at the wrong targets, the American
people are not well served.
