The first sentences from Kaplan's second paragraph sum up all that is wrong with Washington reporting:
Rice isn't used to failure, and most Americans aren't used to thinking of her as one. In Beltway wisdom, she's the star of President Bush's second-term team, someone who has employed smarts, sense and style to try to steer a wiser course in the world.
"Most Americans"? "Beltway wisdom"? "Star"? Loaded with terms of dubious accuracy and insiderism, this hardly bodes well for a serious consideration on the merits. Indeed, part of Kaplan's thesis is that, once, Rice was a "realist" as in real politique who sold her soul to the Bush Administration's "messianism". Educated as Standford University, she was an "expert" on the former Soviet Union. As the American foreign policy never approached political realism in regards to that particular historical dust-bin, one wonders how anyone who understands, or claims to understand, diplomatic history, could possibbly call Rice a realist.
Always conservative, Rice was sold to the American public not on her abilities, but on her supposedly sunny personality, her stylish dressing, and her piano playing ability. Only in Washington, where anyone with the letters p, h, and d after their names is automatically considered something of a sage (that is why the egregiously awful Henry Kissinger is not behind bars; "Why, he has a Ph. D.!"), could Rice be thought of as a "realist" without the quotes, and with a straight face.
Rice's failures, so far, and in to the future are her own. She is operating within an Administration that disdains serious diplomacy. She is operating within an Administration that has made the United States the chief rogue nation in the world, a danger to world peace on a grand scale. Thanks to her bosses, she represents a country with no diplomatic, political, or moral credibility whatsoever. Her word is less than worthless because all who deal with her know that she is not master of foreign policy, but just one more tool, and another poorly used one at that, in the arsenal of bad politics and horrid policy, of the Bush Administration.
We are where we are not only because of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but because they were aided and abetted by lightweights like Condoleeza Rice. Rice may have sold her soul, but I wonder at times if there was much there to sell. Her price was certainly low enough.
