Keepsake Dept.
Condi looks to her legacy
Condi tells Congress that it’s the ‘motion of the ocean’ that matters.
Any questions about the judgment of those running the executive branch should be put to rest as attention turns to the salvaging of legacies. A piece in today’s New York Times looks at a relatively unphased, if not completely culpable, member of the Bush administration’s ecforts to sace her place in history. Though Condoleeza Rice will probably prove more adept at this particular task than George Bush, posterity will unlikely remember what most of these people do after January 2009. No matter how reformed an image Condi puts forth in the coming years, the most indluential years are behind her, culminating in her 2003 statement, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The fact that no such cloud would ever have been possible will be lost on no one.
In her last months as Secretary of State, Condi is trying to turn her record around by focusing on Arab-Israeli peace and containment of North Korea, doing the kind of work that could easily have been achieved in the first months of 2001, when diplomacy was replaced by arrogance and delusion. These current efforts and xertaibl welcomed and long overdue, but sadly for Condi’s legacy, too little too late on issues too peripheral to the damage she helped wreak. For Rice, as well as for Bush and whoever else associated with this White House seeks redemption, only a realistic look at Iraq, acceptance of responsibility and a concerted effort to extricate American combat forces would give these players a chance not to be completely rebuked by history. Anything less is more of the same.
