Bush offers vision of transformed Mideast
WASHINGTON -- President Bush nominated national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to be the next secretary of state yesterday, praising her in an emotional speech as the right person to meet the ambitious foreign policy agenda of his second term.
In nominating Rice to replace Colin L. Powell, Bush also pointed to a desire to move forward with a plan to transform the Muslim world through democracy, tackle the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and create ''new structures and institutions to confront outlaw regimes."
''The United States has undertaken a great calling of history to aid the forces of reform and freedom in the broader Middle East," Bush said in remarks that charted Rice's rise from a childhood in segregated Alabama to the post first held by Thomas Jefferson. ''Dr. Rice has a deep, abiding belief in the value and power of liberty because she has seen freedom denied and freedom reborn."
Rice, a former Stanford University provost who became a confidant to Bush when she tutored him on foreign policy during the 2000 campaign, stood with unrelenting poise that has been her trademark over four tumultuous years. But she shed tears as she praised the president's leadership in effusive terms and said, ''Thank you again for this great opportunity and for your continued confidence in me."
Rice, 50, a vigorous advocate and shaper of Bush's foreign policy vision, is expected to be confirmed in a Senate hearing in the coming months, finalizing the departure of Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, leading moderate voices on Bush's foreign policy team.
Yesterday, Bush named Rice's deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, to replace her as national security adviser.
Some specialists said that the dual appointments could usher in an era of ''Kissingeresque" power, transforming the State Department from what critics of the department under Powell called a lonely outpost of dissent into a sharpened foreign policy tool of the White House.
''It resembles the Nixon model," said Cliff Kupchan, vice president of the Nixon Center, a Washington-based research institute. Nixon's powerful top foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, served simultaneously as national security adviser and secretary of state for a time.
The appointments would streamline US foreign policy for other countries, which complained during Bush's first administration that they received different messages from Powell and the White House. But analysts said the setup would remove the ''creative tension" and normal checks and balances necessary to hone an administration's decision-making.
''The marketplace of ideas at the State Department is gone," Kupchan said. ''Any administration should speak with one voice in public, but behind closed doors, the ability of loyal officials to support good ideas and shoot down bad ideas is critical . . . It's particularly dangerous because the Bush administration is predisposed toward the use of force and those ideas will not be shot down."
How Rice would wield her power is unclear. But her foreign policy views are almost indistinguishable from the president's, and she saw her major role as national security adviser as implementing his vision by doling out responsibilities to various departments.
If confirmed, Rice is not expected to attract the same level of bipartisan support from Congress that Powell received as he boosted the department's agenda.
Democrats were already sharpening their knives for a confirmation hearing in which they plan to highlight Rice's role in the administration's shortcomings, such as her apparent failure to highlight intelligence in the summer of 2001 that suggested Osama bin Laden was about to attack the United States and her insistence that Saddam Hussein possessed a nuclear weapons program.
''Her record is not a record to be proud of and doesn't warrant a promotion," US Representative Martin Meehan, a Lowell Democrat, told the Globe late Monday as news of her appointment became known. ''She has been one of the architects of the postwar plan in Iraq that has failed miserably."
Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar, criticized Rice for preventing him from briefing Bush on Al Qaeda and letting the counterterrorism effort languish due to what he saw as an obsession with Iraq.
Rice told the 9/11 Commission that Cabinet-level ''principals" met 33 times on other issues before they took up Al Qaeda on Sept. 4, 2001, and that the CIA gave Bush a briefing in early August titled ''Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States," but it was too vague to stop the attack.
In October 2003, Bush appointed Rice to head the Iraq Stabilization Group, but one year later the group is almost never mentioned publicly and its members have scattered. Its key member, Robert Blackwill, left the administration earlier this month.
Bush also appointed Rice as the point person on the Middle East peace process, but some specialists, including Edward S. Walker Jr., former US ambassador to Israel, say they suspect that was done to prevent the State Department's career diplomats from engaging in shuttle diplomacy.
''Bush said Condi Rice is going to ride hard on it," said Flynt Leverett, a former Rice aide on Middle East affairs who left his post in frustration in 2003. ''Well, Condi Rice never saddled up."
But praise for Rice poured in yesterday from around the world.
Saeb Erekat, a minister in the Palestinian Cabinet, called Rice ''a very dignified person, with an analytical mind" and said ''I think we will be working closely with her in the hope of implementing President Bush's vision of a two-state solution in his second term."
Like Powell, Rice was brought up in a middle-class family. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister in segregated Birmingham, Ala., she remembers avoiding whites-only drinking fountains.
''There was every expectation that you were going to grow up to be a half-citizen," she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1993.
Attracted to pastimes that required unyielding discipline, she became an accomplished figure skater and classical pianist and went to college at age 15. She mastered the most pressing foreign policy issue of the day -- the Soviet Union's military establishment -- and eventually joined the staff at the National Security Council under George H. W. Bush.
It was then that Rice began to forge her lasting relationship with the Bush family, meeting at their home in Kennebunkport, Maine, with foreign policy heavyweights.
A self-described moderate, she admired the elder Bush, a foreign policy centrist. His national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, another moderate, was her mentor.
Her speech at the Republican convention in 1992 marked her as a rising star in the party. In 1997, Kissinger wrote a piece in Newsweek that predicted she would be secretary of state by 2005.
Powell did not attend Rice's nomination ceremony. But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the secretary ''certainly very much welcomes the announcement of Dr. Rice."
Rice -- who kept a photo of herself and Powell on her wall at Stanford -- called Powell ''one of the finest public servants our nation has ever produced."
Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com. 