Word: rice
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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...
...cordiality, Rice was a critic of the Clinton Administration's policies and habits. She had said as much, in the kind of language that one of Oscar Wilde's more waspish characters might have used. In a famous 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, she insisted that the "Clinton Administration has assiduously avoided implementing an agenda" that "separates the important from the trivial." In an interview with the New York Times just before the election, she dismissed Clinton's affection for peacekeeping by stating that "we don't need to have the 82nd Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten." The Bush team...
...Rice, however, brought more than a distaste for the Clinton way to her new job. There was also her expertise and her President's initial agenda. Arguably, neither has turned out to be ideally suited to the world with which she and Bush have had to cope. Rice had been a distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union, which by 2001 did not exist. During the presidential campaign, she freely admitted to the New York Times that "I've been pressed to understand parts of the world that have not really been part of my scope. I'm really a Europeanist...
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...
...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...