Is Condi The Problem?

Monday, Apr. 05, 2004 By MICHAEL ELLIOTT AND MASSIMO CALABRESI
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Whatever their failings may have been, Clinton's people knew one way in which the world had changed since the early 1990s. At the January 2001 conference at which Scowcroft spoke and which Rice attended, Samuel Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, said that "America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists--nothing less than a war." In answer to a question, Berger was blunt: "We must understand as a nation that we are engaged in a wholly new battle against an international terrorist network in dozens of countries, which is deeply committed to injuring and destroying the United States and its allies. This is one of the most serious threats the next Administration will face."

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There's no reason to doubt that the incoming team appreciated the importance of terrorism. In 1999, in the introduction to the report of a Stanford conference titled The New Terror, Rice wrote that "the threat of biological and chemical weapons is real and growing," and that such threats "can come from small states and terrorists just as easily as from one powerful adversary." Speaking to TIME last week, Rice said, "We were clearly worried about weapons of mass destruction and rogue regimes." Before Sept. 11, she said, Bush had 46 sessions with CIA Director George Tenet "in which there was a piece presented to him on al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda--related issues."

But two other things are equally true. First, whatever their sense of the urgency on the terrorism threat, Bush's officials--who started their own policy review of the subject--didn't think much of the Clinton team's approach to the problem. "There was a sense they hadn't handled it well," Cheney told TIME last week. Second, the new Administration had a lot on its plate. Some things it had heaped there itself, like a commitment to stand down the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972--which, Cheney pointed out last week, needed to be done because "we had campaigned on a platform of missile defense." And some things had been heaped there for them. In April a U.S. reconnaissance plane was forced down in China, leading to a long standoff with Beijing.

From Rice's perspective, it must have seemed during the first months of 2001 that the world had changed less than the Clinton team had thought. Her Foreign Affairs article had stressed the importance of Washington's relations with great powers. And now she was helping manage a crisis with China while preparing for negotiations with Russia on the ABM treaty. In June she accompanied Bush on a trip to Eastern and Central Europe, the very territory that had been the focus of her time in government 10 years before. She wept as the President, in Warsaw, made a commitment to a "great alliance of liberty" with Europe; in Slovenia she watched Bush look into the soul of Russian President Vladimir Putin and find it good. A month later she was in Moscow, negotiating with Putin as if it were 1991 all over again. If there were new threats in a new world, as the Clinton team had said, it surely couldn't have seemed so in the summer of 2001.