Bush will rank high, Rice says
Security chief believes he will be compared with Roosevelt and Churchill
By Bob Deans, Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- As President Bush begins a week of foreign diplomacy, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insists that he will one day rank alongside such towering pillars of 20th century statecraft as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
"Statesmanship has to be judged first and foremost by whether you recognize historic opportunities and seize them," Rice said in an interview with Cox Newspapers.
"When you think of statesmen, you think of people who seized historic opportunities to change the world for the better, people like Roosevelt, people like Churchill, and people like Truman, who understood the challenges of communism. And this president has been an agent of change for the better -- historic change for the better."
Her assessment, as Bush leaves Thursday for Europe, stands in stark contrast to the election-year critiques of the president's political opponents and many policy analysts. They charge that he has pursued a go-it-alone approach to diplomacy that has strained U.S. alliances and divided world opinion rather than uniting it.
"The United States has been dismissive of our allies," said Samuel "Sandy" Berger, who served as national security adviser under President Clinton and now is advising Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who is challenging Bush for the White House. "There's not been much diplomacy in this administration."
Nor has the criticism come just from Democrats.
"The diplomacy is deficient," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., told reporters recently. Looking around the world, he said, "Not many people agree with us or like us or, for that matter, are prepared to work with us."
Rice chalked up such criticism as the price for leadership amid turmoil.
It was Bush, she said, who first recognized "that it was time to stop mumbling about the need for a Palestinian state" and spoke out in favor of a two-state solution to the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.
She said Bush is engaged in a "classical American role" by trying to rally international support for efforts to help shift the Arab and Muslim worlds toward democracy and economic integration in ways meant to undermine the roots of militant Islam.
She praised the invasion Bush ordered that toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where Rice said democracy is taking root and "women are being schooled, not beaten, where people are planting their crops and building their stores and building their homes without fear of being whipped in a public stadium."
And she insisted that in Iraq, the outcome would justify the difficulty and sacrifice of a mission that has left 812 American troops dead and another 4,882 wounded since March 2003.
"The Iraqi people now have a chance to build a free and democratic Iraq, which will make a huge difference in creating a different kind of Middle East," said Rice. "And, unless you create a different kind of Middle East, unless you deal with the circumstances that produced the ideologies of hatred that led people to fly airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington on September the 11th, we are never going to be able to fully deal with the terrorist threat."
Critics point out that the alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, upon which Bush based his case for war, have yet to be found. At one point during the interview late Tuesday, Rice was asked whether the administration misjudged the challenge in Iraq or has anything to apologize for regarding the mission to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"I feel badly that the Iraqi people had to live under that monster for as long as they did," she replied.
"We can let history judge what tactical things might have been done differently here or there, what decisions might have been taken that were different here or there," said Rice.
"But historic times tend to be pretty turbulent, and what you have to do is to get the direction right, the strategic direction right...What history will judge is that the strategic decision here was the right decision."
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Bush leaves Thursday for a week of intensive diplomacy centered around securing international support for efforts to stabilize and rebuild Iraq and to nurse its fledgling political life toward democratic elections in January.
He goes first to Rome, where he will meet with Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Bush travels Saturday to Paris, where he will be hosted by President Jacques Chirac, an opponent of the Iraq war. And on Sunday Bush goes to Normandy to mark the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that opened U.S. and Allied efforts to liberate Europe from Nazi occupation.
From there, Bush travels to Sea Island, Ga., to host the annual summit of leaders from the so-called Group of Eight industrialized democracies: the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.
The flurry of diplomatic activity will cast Bush in an election-year role most presidents savor -- that of American statesman-in-chief. It will also provide his reelection campaign with fresh images of Bush touching down in world capitals aboard Air Force One, then leading his big-power counterparts in Sea Island summitry, amid a pitched presidential battle analysts expect to be heavily influenced by national security policy and foreign affairs.
From the presidential campaign trail, Kerry has blasted Bush's stewardship of foreign policy, accusing his administration of a "failed approach" in Iraq.
"They looked to force before exhausting diplomacy. They bullied when they should have persuaded. They have gone it alone when they should have assembled a team," Kerry told supporters in a campaign speech last week. Bush, Kerry summed up, "has divided the world instead of uniting it."
In the 40-minute interview in her West Wing office, Rice presented a vigorous and at times passionate rebuttal. She argued that Bush has embraced the challenges and opportunities the country has faced since being attacked by terrorists three years ago.
"If you ask yourself what has been the response of this president to the fundamentally changed environment in which we find ourselves after September the 11th, on just about every front that you could name he has been someone who has recognized historic opportunities and seized them," Rice concluded. "Statesmanship is judged by whether you can do that and by historical outcomes, not by the day's headlines."
Bob Deans may be e-mailed at bobdeans(at)coxnews.com
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