The US secretary of state was feted as "brilliant" and "gifted", but her tenure is now acknowledged as a disastrous failure.

How things change. It was less than three years ago that the British embassy here put on a ludicrously lavish extravaganza to mark the 50th birthday of the person whom they wrongly considered to be the most powerful woman in the world. "Dr" Condoleezza Rice, then George W Bush's disastrously inept national security adviser and now his equally feckless secretary of state, walked into the ambassador's residence and gasped when she was met by more than a hundred guests lining the curved Lutyens double staircase, applauding fervently and singing "Happy Birthday to You".

The British ambassador, Sir David Manning, had thought of everything with his team: much to the relief of the woman who had arrived in slacks and a suede jacket, thinking she was going out for dinner with her aunt, Manning and his staff had obtained her measurements beforehand and were able to whisk her away so that she could change into a scarlet ballgown, specially made for the occasion by her favourite designer, Oscar de la Renta. Her very own hairdresser, whom the embassy had also thoughtfully provided, snipped away. And the honoured guest finally joined the throng as Van Cliburn, considered (again wrongly) to be America's greatest pianist, hammered out the national anthem.

The full extent of the Iraq catastrophe was already beginning to dawn on most of Washington, but the British had always been peculiarly bewitched by Rice - dating back to pre-invasion days when Manning, then Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser at 10 Downing Street, talked to her practically every day over the transatlantic phone line. Sir Christopher Meyer, Manning's immediate predecessor, could hardly contain himself when he described Rice a year later in his book DC Confidential: "Extraordinarily gifted . . . can play the piano to a professional standard . . . fine ice-skater . . . brilliant academic career."

This British lovefest, and the resulting mis calculation of both the abilities and importance of Condoleezza Rice, now seem thoroughly emblematic, in a tragicomic kind of way, of what George W Bush - via the lips of Rory Bremner, I have to say - describes as the Bush-Blair "error". The British rightly sussed out that Rice was closer personally to Bush than anybody else in the administration. After all, she spent weekends at Camp David and watched football with him, didn't she? True, very true, but the British government was not sufficiently plugged in to Washington to realise that the Bush administration was hopelessly dysfunctional even before it moved into the White House in January 2001, so much so, that proximity to Bush was virtually valueless from the very beginning.

Flailing around

Bush adopted Rice - black, and a woman - as a kind of mascot for his administration. He is genuinely fond of her, but that doesn't mean he has ever paid any serious attention to what his inexperienced appointee has had to say. He always listened much more closely to hugely experienced Washington infighters such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom considered foreign policy to be part of their portfolios. As national security adviser, Rice flailed around desperately in the middle, letting both men trample all over her, and took command of US foreign policy away from Colin Powell, theoretically Bush's secretary of state, and his deputy, Richard Armitage. "The calamitous consequences [of this] are likely to be felt for years to come," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, US national security adviser himself from 1977-81.

Rice's "brilliance", too, is vastly overstated. Long before Manning's guests wildly cheered her, Washington insiders - ranging from Powell himself to Dubbya's father, the former President Bush - had given up on her. Dick Clarke, chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council during both the Clinton and Bush II administrations, until he resigned in despair in 2003, tells the story of how he gave a top-secret security briefing about al-Qaeda to Rice during the 2000-2001 transition even before Bush had moved into the White House. It was clear, he says, that she had never even heard of al-Qaeda - and, as a result, was sceptical of everything he had to say.

George Tenet, director of central intelligence for both Bill Clinton and George W Bush until he resigned in despair four months before the British embassy's Ricefest, had a similar experience. In some desperation, he took a senior CIA undercover man as part of a deputation to warn Rice at her White House office on 10 July 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning "spectacular" attacks "designed to inflict mass casualties" against the United States, and that "multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible and they will occur with little or no warning". Rice turned to Clarke and asked: "Dick, is this true?" Clarke leaned forward and buried his face in his hands before managing to croak out, "Yes."

In what has been a pattern of duplicity and truth-shading unrivalled even by the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Rice has subsequently repeatedly denied and/or played down that she received multiple briefings (and memos) such as these. Indeed, practically all of Washington - with the notable exceptions of George W Bush and British diplomats - was privately wringing its hands over Rice's incompetence long before she reached her 50th birthday.

David Kay, chief weapons inspector for the United Nations and then the CIA, called her "probably the worst national security adviser since the office was created". Larry Wilkerson, once Powell's chief of staff at the state department, described her tenure as "a very disastrous four years". Even George H W Bush, according to Bob Woodward in State of Denial, thought she was "not up to the job".

Besmirched by Iraq

Belatedly, and just like the boss to whom she still has undying fealty, Rice now realises that only history can redeem her reputation from being besmirched for ever by the Iraq catastrophe. In this hope, and unprecedentedly for a serving secretary of state, she has been co-operating with a series of biographers. The second and perhaps most important of the resulting books, The Confidante, by the veteran Washington Post journalist Glenn Kessler, came out on 4 September and was hardly reassuring. "She was one of the weakest national security advisers in US history," Kessler concludes. "Her inexperience and her mistakes in that job have shaped the world and coloured the choices she must handle as secretary of state."

How, then, did the Rice phenomenon arise? Partly it is because she has a staggering résumé and is unhindered by self-doubt. She plays the cards life has dealt her, constantly using the phrase "twice as good", for example, meaning that a black person has to be twice as good as a white person to succeed; that has now morphed into the title of one of this year's biographies. I suspect that Bush loves the image of her pulling herself by the bootstraps out of the slums of Alabama - but her suburban upbringing there was actually more middle-class and affluent than those of most of us.

She was the doted-on only child of second-generation college graduates who pressure-cooked her through childhood with a bombardment of piano, ballet, ice-skating and academic lessons; she went to a private, all-girls' Catholic school called St Mary's Academy, and was given her own Steinway grand piano when she was 15. Her family had moved to Colorado when she was 12 because her father was appointed assistant dean at the University of Denver; predictably, she duly pressure-cooked herself through that university, emerging with a doctorate in politics at 26. Earlier, I used inverted commas to highlight her use of "Dr" to describe herself because it is telling; even erstwhile colleagues like Paul Wolfowitz, who earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago before teaching at Yale, would not dream of calling himself "Dr" in the same way.

Résumés, in any case, can be misleading. From Denver, she obtained an assistant professorship in politics at the then troubled Stanford University, working her way up to become second-in-command there, as provost. In her interview for the job, she had expressed enthusiasm for affirmative action for women and minorities. But, once in office, she laid people off, cut services and eliminated courses; the numbers of women and black academics obtaining tenure decreased dramatically under her.

She nevertheless conceded unguardedly at one contentious faculty meeting in 1998 that "I am myself a beneficiary of a Stanford strategy that took affirmative action seriously". Asked why then she was not promoting such policies herself, she replied tartly: "I'm the chief academic officer now." Rice subsequently took a leave of absence from Stanford in 2000 to become George W Bush's not-hugely-successful tutor in foreign affairs, having also put in obligatory stints as director of major corporations such as Chevron (which obligingly renamed its oil tanker Condoleezza Rice the Altair Voyager when she took office).

The rest, sadly, is history - an object lesson in how political fables are created and then implode. Condoleezza Rice, the brilliant Sovietologist who failed to foresee glasnost or the break-up of the Soviet Union; who then wanted to get rid of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as soon as Bush had peered into Vladimir Putin's soul and seen a decent man; who, warned repeatedly of the dangers of al-Qaeda in 2001, failed even to call a meeting of Bush administration officials to discuss the threat as Clarke had desperately urged her to do, in writing, on 25 January 2001; who ignored warnings of the consequences of not planning for post-invasion Iraq; who knifed old mentors such as Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell in the back; and whose one forlorn hope of vindication now is that she can somehow bring peace to the Middle East in her remaining 16 months in office. Back at Stanford, there are already organised protests over the prospect of her returning there in 2009.

I'm told that Sir Nigel Sheinwald, who succeeds Manning as British ambassador here this month, is less enamoured of Ms Rice than his two predecessors. She will be 53 in less than two months' time, but for some reason I don't see British taxpayers having to shell out for any opulent Condi spectaculars in 2007. It wouldn't be appropriate and might even seem like bad judgement, somehow.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website