Off the record, Congressional Republicans are slamming Secretary Condoleeza Rice's performance as utterly incompentant. Negroponte had to be moved from DNI to State, they say, to keep the Department from unraveling:
Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Republicans and Democrats alike, were alarmed last week that John Negroponte was leaving as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) after less than two years to become deputy secretary of state. By way of explanation, he informed one Republican senator that he did not want to make the switch but that the White House prevailed on him.
Just what career diplomat Negroponte was doing as the new intelligence czar in the first place is puzzling. But to pull him out just as his on-the-job training as DNI had been completed reflects a panicky desire to fill the deputy secretary's post that had been unfilled for an unprecedented six months. Five other key State Department positions are either vacant or soon to be vacant.
Republicans in Congress, who do not want to be quoted, tell me the State Department under Secretary Condoleezza Rice is a mess. That comes at a time when the U.S. global position is precarious. While attention focuses on Iraq, American diplomacy is being tested worldwide -- in Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, Korea and Sudan. The judgment by thoughtful Republicans is that Rice has failed to manage that endeavor.
James Baker and and Brent Scowcroft also tied the fortunes of the "Iraq Study Group" to Rice, an effort that failed spectacularly. Sidney Bluemnthal reports:
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.
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The State Department has been completely sidelined in the making of Bush's latest and last policy on Iraq. Its experience in the Balkans remains thoroughly ignored. And Rice does nothing to call it to Bush's attention, for that would require her to point out his shortcomings. The State Department founders like a ghost ship. Rice meanders back and forth to and from the Middle East, the shuttle without the diplomacy.
After twice rejecting the job of deputy secretary of state, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, was implored to accept it. In exchanging a Cabinet post for a sub-Cabinet one, a position of policymaking for an administrative post, Negroponte excited rumors that he would only have decided to make the switch if he believed that Rice would eventually leave and he would ascend to her job. But, once again, the logic of that Washington gossip is merely rational. Rice the irrelevancy remains Bush's indispensable devotee.
The Bush administration has been roundly criticized for refusing to negotiate with Iran and Syria. But, considering the rank incompetance at the top the State Department, perhaps negotiation is the LAST thing we want this administration to be doing.
The Iraq war was wrongly conceived and would not have gone well no matter who was minding the store. But Bush's prediliction to coddle rankly incompetant subordinates (Harriet Meiers, "Heck of a job, Brownie"), has turned a bad situation gravely worse. As a result, the US military is nearly broken, and the Middle East is going up in flames.
The only thing we can do to survive the next two years is to constrain this Administration's options as much as possible. The less they do, the better. Things won't be hunky-dory if the Executive Branch does nothing between now and January 20, 2009, but they won't be as bad as they could be if these rank incompentants are allowed to continue to fuck things up without any checks or balances.
In other words, each and every day from now until January 20, 2009, the word of the day has got to be. . . STOP.