George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he's not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.Take Condoleeza Rice, for instance. As Bush's national security council chief, she presided over the administration's total lack of interest in counter-terrorism activities. It was Rice, you'll recall, who referred in testimony before the 9/11 commission to the Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US" as a "historical document" unworthy of notice.
Today, we receive official notice that as secretary of state, Rice set out to do for diplomacy what she did for national security. Vanity Fair has the documentary scoop on a scheme concoted by Rice and Iran-Contra convict Elliot Abrams to provoke a civil war in Palestine between the military wings of Hamas, the democratically elected ruling party much loathed by the Bush administration, and Fatah, the electoral losers who were loathed by the administration when in power but gained respectability by virtue of losing.
In true Bush-like fashion, and with the president's blessing, Rice and Abrams not only set out to provoke a war but backed the losing side. They had no idea Hamas would win the Palestinian general election, which they had pressured Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to call despite his concerns that Hamas was better organized and more popular than his Fatah movement, and once Hamas did win, they completely underestimated Hamas's popularity while overestimating Fatah's strength. And of course they selected as the vehicle of their dreams a man, Gaza warlord and long-time Fatah enforcer Muhammad Dahlan, whom the president and other senior administration officials had met and assessed as a man they could do business with.The lone named Bush administration source in the story contemporary to the events under discussion is former Cheney aide David Wurmser, a staunch neoconservative who was central to the administration's efforts to promote the invasion of Iraq. Ironically, after two decades of advocating various forms of violence and subversion as a solution to the region's problems, Wurmser complained to writer David Rose of a "stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy" and the Rice-Abrams scheme.
Here's what Rice had to say about the Hamas electoral sweep. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.” But news accounts from the months before the election describe Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas's anxiety over his party's fading popularity, a concern that led him to postpone the elections once and which proved to be well-founded. Had she read the newspapers, she would have known. And Dahlan, the administration's point man for the Fatah coup, says he was telling everyone he knew in the administration that Fatah wasn't ready for elections.
Rice's statement about the Hamas victory is spookily reminiscent of her claim that no one could have predicted that terrorists would use hijacked airliners as weapons, even though US intelligence agencies had predicted exactly that. (And score one for pop culture, too: the pilot episode of X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen, which aired six months before 911 in March of 2001, featured a terrorist plot to fly a hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center. Clearly, administration officials don't watch enough TV.)
Rice was also warned that despite its evident superiority in numbers, Fatah's security forces were splintered, poorly motivated and highly unpopular, but despite years of accumulating evidence from the US experience with arming and training similarly dysfunctional forces in Iraq, she chose to believe that the US proxy in Palestine could carry the day.
Vanity Fair presents its revelation of the Rice plot as something of a scoop, but the only real news is the documentary evidence the reporter uncovered. In point of fact, as we noted at the time, the administration signalled their intention well in advance ("Iraq isn’t going well; how about a civil war in Palestine?"), and were transparently involved once the fighting between Hamas and Fatah broke out in earnest ("Finally, a Bush administration success in Palestine: civil war"). If the Vanity Fair story comes as a surprise, one can chalk it up to the traditional failure of the US institutional press to adequately cover both the administration and the Middle East generally.
The Palestine misadventure is only one of the chapters catapulting Rice into contention for worst secretary of state ever; it's among a series of situations in which she embraces a bad idea and executes it as incompetently as possible. She may not have her position as thoroughly locked up as Bush has his, but she stands alone by virtue of also qualifying as a finalist in the category of worst national security advisor ever. It's a matter of some regret to us that she decided not to run for president or vice president and thus throw her hat into those rings as well.
