WASHINGTON: The pope politely declined to meet with her, saying he was on vacation. When she travels overseas, the local papers do not do big photo spreads anymore.
At home, Condoleezza Rice is feuding with congressional Democrats and scrambling to counter recent embarrassments including the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by the State Department’s hired bodyguards.
The rock star diplomat has become the workaday American secretary of state, with all the advantages and all the baggage that the title and Rice’s long association with President George Bush and the Iraq war entail.
Well-traveled, energetic and consistently more popular than her boss, Rice nonetheless has a mixed record as the America’s top diplomat. If Cabinet secretaries got report cards, most major categories for Rice would be marked ‘incomplete’.
Rice has completed no peace treaties or other major foreign policy pacts in her nearly three years on the job, although some deals are in the works.
Her effort to place more US diplomats in strategic hotspots like the Middle East stumbled this fall when too few diplomats volunteered for hardship duty in Iraq. After a row over the prospect of forced service in a war zone, enough people stepped forward.
“How’s she doing? Well, we haven’t got peace between Israel and the Palestinians yet, and we’re still in Iraq and we’re still in Afghanistan and the Pakistan government is still teetering on the edge,” said Gordon Adams, a professor of international relations at American University. “The one single point of progress — and it’s not a success yet — is North Korea.”
Now on the down slope of the Bush administration, Rice is gambling that she can succeed where past diplomats have failed as she works to restart Mideast peace talks after a nearly seven-year lull.
Rice is playing host next week to a conference meant to commit Israel and the Palestinians to intensive negotiations toward establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.
It is the administration’s most visible intercession in a conflict that Rice and other advisers had given little energy and attention for most of Bush’s nearly seven years in office. It is also an effort that invites comparisons of Rice’s diplomatic skills with those of past statesmen who, late in their terms, sought a solution to the decades-long problem as a potential crowning achievement.Mideast peace is a sort of foreign policy Holy Grail, a seemingly soluble problem with enormous practical and symbolic ramifications, yet one that has eluded two generations of talented diplomats.
If she succeeds, Rice could easily claim a place alongside former top diplomats Henry Kissinger as a peacemaker or George Shultz as a shrewd negotiator. If she fails, it would set back the prospects for whichever US diplomat tries next.
Rice scoffed last month at the notion that she is seeking to burnish her own reputation or legacy in Washington.
“There are probably easier foreign policy tasks to take on than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” she told a House hearing that had begun with an Iraq war protester rushing Rice and shouting “war criminal”.
Rice has ruled out a run for president, as her most ardent fans had hoped, and says she will return to teaching when she leaves office. She claims little interest in how history will appraise her tenure, but apparently does have one eye on her legacy: She has hired a personal photographer who accompanied her on her last two trips to Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The pictures will become part of Rice’s archive at the State Department, and some will appear on an expanded bells-and-whistles department website that Rice considers an accomplishment.
Lingering bad feelings over the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 may have been part of the reason that Pope Benedict XVI refused Rice’s request for a meeting last summer. The pope was reportedly also making a point about papal opposition to US policies on the treatment of prisoners abroad when he declined the offer. The move was widely viewed as a snub, but Rice’s spokesman said she did not see it that way.
Rice gets credit abroad for improving US relations with European allies — a historical tie worn thin by disagreements over the Iraq war and US policies in the global hunt for terrorists — and to a lesser extent for offering potentially breakthrough talks with Iran. Tehran has refused US terms for such negotiations, and attempts to force Iran to give up disputed nuclear activities have gone nowhere.
Rice also has tried to strike major nuclear bargains with North Korea and India, but neither has come to fruition. There has been progress on North Korea, however.
The pact to trade economic and other incentives for North Korea’s renunciation of nuclear weapons appears on track, although Rice’s critics say her earlier inattention to North Korea helped give the secretive nation elbow room to build and test a nuclear bomb last year.
The India deal, which would not require India to give up its nuclear weapons but would allow greater international oversight, is in danger of collapsing.
The push for Middle East progress, however, may define Rice’s job performance. Usually composed and cool in public, Rice gave a glimpse of the stakes she faces during a news conference this month with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“What is ahead of us is indeed very difficult work,” Rice said. “If this had been an easy conflict to resolve and to end, it would have been done years ago.”—AP
