Is Condi The Problem?

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Sept. 11 proved that officials in the Clinton Administration had been right; the calculations and practices forged during the cold war were inadequate to new conditions. Rice told TIME that for her the attacks that day meant that the idea of the nation being at war was no longer just a figure of speech. "For both the eight years of the Clinton Administration and for the first eight months of ours," she said, "we were not on a war footing. War really came to us in a different way on Sept. 11."

Rice had no direct experience in dealing with Islamic nations or terrorism. That in itself was no bar to her continuing to perform the three tasks that she sees as central to her job--acting as an adviser and confidant to the President, performing as his staff officer on national-security matters and coordinating the government machinery so all voices are heard. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Rice chaired numerous Principals Committee meetings, on everything from force protection to diplomacy with Central Asian countries, to keep Bush's agenda moving forward.

But the attacks on Washington and New York City did more than just shift the focus of policy away from great-power relations. The crisis reminded the world that--quite apart from the President--there were plenty of people among his top advisers with far more experience than Rice and with very firm agendas of their own. As the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban morphed into plans for an attack on Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, it became clear that the Bush team was deeply split. By 2003 there were at least four different streams of thought among Administration officials. Some people, epitomized by Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to use U.S. power to sort out the arc of crisis in the Muslim world. There were those--Rumsfeld, usually supported by Cheney--whose purpose was less to change the world than to defend America's interests in it and who were willing to use force unilaterally and pre-emptively snuff out what they considered potential threats. The State Department, for its part, continued to press for multilateral solutions to crises and wanted to explore nonmilitary policy prescriptions as much as the use of force. And then there were sub-Cabinet officials like Clarke (who was not alone) for whom the war on Iraq was a mistaken diversion from the fight against al-Qaeda and other jihadists.

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