Shuttle without diplomacy

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

Read more: Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, James Baker, State Department, Opinion, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Iraq War, Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq Study Group

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice looks on as President Bush holds a news conference on Monday, Aug. 7, 2006 in Crawford, Texas.

Jan. 10, 2007 | James Baker, the consummate Republican political operator over the past 30 years, did not expect that President Bush would accept the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group he co-chaired simply on its merits. Baker's hidden political hand was unrevealed in the report's dire analysis or in its urgent suggestions for diplomacy or force redeployment. Baker summoned as witnesses the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military commanders in Iraq past and present (including the recently named commander there, Gen. David Petraeus) and even British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But he understood that enlisting all of these formidable figures was insufficient. Baker privately negotiated with Bush, but he did not rest solely on his own powers of persuasion to convince the president, as the report put it, that the "situation is grave and deteriorating" and his policies are "not working."

Ultimately, Baker's political strategy counted on the decisive intervention of one person in the president's closed inner circle -- who sees him alone and could not be kept from him, and on whom he has become dependent for support and trusts implicitly -- to deliver the bad news that continuing those policies would only deepen the disaster and explain that he had no way out except to change course.

After the debacle of the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called "the birth pangs of a new Middle East," her former mentor, Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush's national security advisor and still his public voice, published an article on July 30, 2006, in the Washington Post titled "Beyond Lebanon: This Is the Time for a U.S.-Led Comprehensive Settlement." In it he argued that the peace process the Bush administration had abandoned was essential in stabilizing the whole region, not least Iraq, and in reducing the influence of Iran.

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.

Rice's turn appeared to be reflected in a speech delivered at the Middle East Institute in Washington on Sept. 15 by Philip Zelikow, her counselor, closest aide and friend, who had served with her under Scowcroft on the elder Bush's National Security Council. Well publicized in advance, he asserted that "some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is just a sine qua non for their ability to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of things that we care about." Immediately, Zelikow came under fierce criticism from Vice President Cheney's office and Rice publicly rebuked him, which provoked his abrupt resignation. In a Nov. 27 letter to her, he wrote that he had "some truly riveting obligations to college bursars" for his children's tuition and instantly had to return to his professorship at the University of Virginia (not exactly Goldman Sachs).

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.

Next page: Cheney galvanized his neoconservative allies to counter the Iraq Study Group report