George W. Bush has a death grip on the title of Worst US President Ever, but he’s not alone in achieving historic levels of incompetence: his cabinet secretaries are pulling their weight as well.
Take Condoleezza Rice, for instance. As Bush’s national security council chief, she presided over the administration’s total lack of interest in counter-terrorism […]

Condi did it.
No, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice didn’t pull the trigger or build the bomb or hire the assassin, but it was the U.S. effort to force Pakistan’s dictator, Pervex Musharraf, into a power-sharing arrangement with Bhutto that led directly to her death.
Steve Clemons, proprietor of the Washington Note and an up-and-coming member […]

My friend Cell Whitman emailed me a few days ago about a C-SPAN interview with the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. Kessler was discussing U.S. - Soviet relations, and the difficulties they present putative Russia expert Condoleezza Rice, when he let fly with this little gem about Bush and Putin:
[A]t his very first meeting with Putin, […]

U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice appears to have reverted to her Cold War roots with her announcement last month, in tandem with fellow cold warrior and US defense secretary Robert Gates, that the US intends to sell some $20 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab […]

The Washington Post reported Sunday on a Pentagon official in Iraq who has drawn the ire of other government officials by unilaterally reconstituting some of that country’s state-owned industries.
Paul Brinkley, a deputy undersecretary of defense, has been called a Stalinist by U.S. diplomats in Iraq. One has accused him of helping insurgents build better […]

Germany has become the second European country to issue arrest warrants for CIA agents involved in kidnapping terrorism suspects for transportation to third countries where the suspects are abused and often tortured. German citizen Khaled El-Masri was snatched from the German border, flown to Afghanistan where he was beaten and tortured, and was then dumped […]

There’s a revealing tidbit in a “Sporting Scene” article in the current New Yorker that sheds some light on today’s front page Washington Post story about how the Bush administration wants American troops to start killing Iranians in Iraq…

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice granted an interview to three somewhat incurious New York Times reporters on Friday. During the course of it she implied that Iraq would be unsalvageable if Baghdad wasn’t under control by sometime this summer and, in bits and pieces, identified concerns about Iran that echo, sometimes almost verbatim, those […]

President Bush and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice have both been drawing hopeful analogies between Iraq and Vietnam. What Vietnam teaches us, they say, is that over time old enemies can reconcile and a war-torn nation can chart a happy future. This is both true and, in context, unbelievably bizarre.
To review: the US spent 15 […]

You’ll know Baghdad is safe for human habitation when a Bush administration official can announce a visit to Iraq’s capitol in advance. That won’t happen before the clock runs out on the administration in January of 2009: the city isn’t safe for anyone, even inside the alternate reality known as the Green Zone, and it’s […]