The Economist's Lexington Is Finally Shrill!
The Economist's Lexington correspondent is finally shrill! It writes a good article about Condi Rice.
It's at least four years too late for such an article to be useful and informative, however:
Economist.com | Articles by Subject | Lexington: [Condi Rice's] fingerprints are on some of the worst mistakes of the first Bush term. She claimed the White House was unaware of the CIA's doubts about whether Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger, for example, despite the fact that her office had received two memos on the subject and a call from the CIA director. But her culpability is deeper than that. When Ms Rice ran the National Security Council (NSC), it was hopelessly dysfunctional....
Ms Rice has also proved a disappointing manager of the State Department....
Ms Rice made her career by impressing powerful establishment figures.... But what happens when your patrons disagree?... [Rice] chose to flatter her current patron.... [She]... started her career... sceptical about nation-building and democratisation. She might have chosen to restrain her boss's Manichaean instincts with a dose of that realism. Instead she went along with him. Being a perfect protégée can get one a long way up the greasy pole...
I pay for the *Economist* in the hope that it can tell me true things about the world that I don't already know, rather than confirm things that I learned from other sources four years ago.
