Condoleeza Rice: A faithful servant of the Commander-in-Chief

Condoleeza Rice, former classical pianist who over the years morphed herself into an iron lady, is now leading Bush's war on terror. Profile by Dave Lindorff

Condoleeza Rice has not been a central figure in the Bush administration to the extent of the dark lord, vice president Dick Cheney, or the face of the Iraq war, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Nor has she been a key figure in "big picture" strategic planning, as have former Deputy Defence Secretary (and now World Bank President) Paul Wolfowitz or indicted Cheney chief-of-staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

But Rice – who got her start in the administration of Bush's father, former President George HW Bush – has at the same time played a unique role in the evolving hegemonic and unilateralist policies of the current Bush administration because of her special relationship with the current president.

Theirs is a relationship so close that at one time when she was still Bush's National Security Council director, she referred to him, during an interview, as her "husband".

Single all her life, prior to her political life she was a professor at Stanford University, where she made a name for herself by helping to slash the prestige university's budget while supervising a major building program on campus.

Originally a Democrat who had voted for President Jimmy Carter in 1976, she jumped to the Republican Party over what she considered the Democrats' too-soft policy towards the Soviet Union, particularly over the issue of the Soviet war and occupation in Afghanistan.

In the first Bush administration she played a relatively minor role, working in the National Security Council under Brent Scowcroft, primarily on issues relating to Russia and the Eastern European states. Along the way, she became personally close to the Bush family.

When George W Bush set out on his campaign for the White House, Rice was put in charge of foreign policy issues. Given that the younger Bush was notoriously and willfully ignorant of foreign affairs, Rice was also his tutor.

During the campaign, her influence was evident both in Bush's call for a revitalised military, and in his criticisms of Clinton-era "nation-building" projects.

Rice was never one of the neoconservatives – that group of radicals, some of them former leftists who'd switched sides, led by Cheney and Wolfowitz – who eventually hijacked Bush foreign policy with their dreams of an American empire, dominating the world militarily, and operating free of international constraints. Always more of a believer in the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger and of his associate and her mentor, Brent Scowcroft, Rice was a savvy enough bureaucratic warrior to know where the power lay, and to reach an accommodation with the reigning neocons in the Bush White House.

The neocons, working through an organisation called the Project for a New American Century had, during the 2000 Bush campaign, published a treatise called 'Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century'. Among other things, this document proposed overthrowing Saddam Hussein as an opening gambit in establishing a US dominance over the Middle East oil region.

Rice was not a signatory of that document, and when, following the 9-11 attacks, the neocon agenda was adopted wholeheartedly by the Bush-Cheney administration, with plans set in motion to invade Iraq almost immediately, it is significant that Scowcroft went public with his criticism of the plan. It seems likely that Rice, who earlier in the Bush administration had spoken of the success of the US-led embargo in blocking Hussein's military ambitions, was probably also less than enthusiastic about the Iraq invasion plan. But being the faithful Bush family servant and office politician that she is, it is also clear that she would not have gotten in front of that steamroller either.

Indeed, as Bush's top national security advisor during his first term, it's fair to say that Rice was the gatekeeper to the president's ear on foreign policy issues, and that she did little or nothing to dissuade him from believing and accepting the slanted policies and intelligence that were being cooked up and fed to him by Cheney's and Wolfowitz's parallel intelligence operations. She was, in that sense, an enabler, inflating the ego of a man of little intellect who was itching to be a "war president" and a commander-in-chief.

Rice went on to support the administration's campaign of lies, famously warning that America could wake up to a "mushroom cloud" if it continued to ignore Saddam Hussein's alleged efforts to acquire a nuclear capability – an eventuality she herself had thoroughly discounted just two years earlier.

Since the war in Iraq Rice has continued, in her new role as Secretary of State, to toe the line of the administration, particularly on the matter of how captives from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and the so-called War on Terror are treated by US forces and agencies.

In her confirmation hearing in January, Rice refused to call the terrible abuses that had been exposed at Abu Ghraib and other detainment facilities "torture". She had sent members of the National Security Council (NSC) to Abu Ghraib, and must have known the kinds of things that were going on there, but had done nothing to stop them as NSC director.

And while she eventually was the one who intervened to free Khaled al-Masri – a German citizen who had been kidnapped by US agents while on a visit to Macedonia and spirited away to Afghanistan, where he was held and tortured in a case of mistaken identity because his name resembled that of a suspected terrorist – Rice only acted when his plight had become an international scandal.

Now in Europe, she is stand firm by her statements denying torture and the US right to render captive to other countries.

Dave Lindorff is an investigative journalist, a columnist for CounterPunch and the author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns, entitled This Can't Be Happening, is published by Common Courage Press. www.thiscantbehappening.net