Among the many fascinating nuggets in Vice President Dick Cheney’s forthcoming memoir, In My Time, is a lengthy discussion of the Bush administration’s second-term foreign policy. It comes in a chapter he calls “Setback,” in which he discusses the lengths to which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went to engage and accommodate Iran, Syria, and North Korea. The sum total of those efforts, he argues, was a setback for the Bush Doctrine established in the first term.
One anecdote that might be particularly amusing for readers of this magazine is Cheney’s retelling of Rice’s determination to convince a recalcitrant North Korea to accept the many preemptive concessions the United States had been offering. In the second term, State Department officials had downplayed North Korea’s nuclear tests, had worked to block public release of information on North Korea’s involvement in developing a nuclear reactor in Syria, had pushed to accept an incomplete declaration of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons activities, and, at one point, had even held a fun-filled, boozy evening with their North Korean counterparts to convince them that the United States really meant well.
Kim Jong Il being Kim Jong Il, and having learned from more than a decade of American capitulation, wanted more. Rice was happy to oblige. In late May 2008, at a small meeting of top national security officials in the office of national security adviser Steve Hadley, Rice announced that she wanted to go to Pyongyang.
Cheney objected. “The North Koreans still hadn’t provided a full and complete declaration of their nuclear activities, I pointed out, and now, suddenly we would be sending the secretary of state to Pyongyang? It was a bad idea.” Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seconded Cheney’s argument. “I think a number of us were getting tired of refighting the same battles in meeting after meeting where it seemed we had to argue against yet another misguided approach from the State Department.”
Cheney continues:
Steve brought the meeting to a close and said he and Condi would report the group’s views back to the president. A short while later, I was sitting in my office when one of the president’s senior advisors came through the door, holding a copy of that week’s Weekly Standard. The cover story was titled “In the Driver’s Seat: Condoleezza Rice and the Jettisoning of the Bush Doctrine.” Pointing to the cover, the senior advisor said, “Yet another reason why Condi should not go to North Korea.”
As the headline of that June 2, 2008, article by Stephen F. Hayes suggested, Rice had already done damage to the Bush Doctrine by the time she proposed her trip to North Korea—a visit that would have given Kim even more undeserved legitimacy.
The Scrapbook is tickled that even if this magazine couldn’t fully persuade George W. Bush to stick to the doctrine that bears his name, at least we may have played a small role in killing a trip that, like Madeleine Albright’s ill-fated photo-op in 2000, would have proved to be a national embarrassment.
Rice in the Dictator’s Photo Album
"I’m not a religious man,” said Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt when they met off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941, “but I thank God that such a man as you is the head of your government at a time like this.” Roosevelt, for his part, was slightly more guarded in his expressions of affection for Churchill—he was slightly more guarded in his expressions of affections for everyone—but he did once append this note in a letter to 10 Downing Street: “It is fun to be in the same decade with you!”
All of which reminds The Scrapbook that, realpolitik notwithstanding, genuine friendships sometimes do spring up between statesmen. Charles de Gaulle of France and Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, despite initial (and obvious) mutual suspicions, seem to have developed a warm personal rapprochement in the early 1960s. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, despite the occasional policy dispute, seemed genuinely fond of one another.
None of this, however, had quite prepared The Scrapbook for the incontrovertible evidence of Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s infatuation—there is no other word for it—with Condoleezza Rice. We had known, as the whole world had known, that the colonel liked the then-secretary of state: “Leezza, Leezza, Leezza,” he purred to Al Jazeera in 2007, “I love her very much.” But such ardent expressions of affection were put down at the time to (a) the colonel’s famous eccentricity, and (b) his notion of himself as an African as much as an Arab. Qaddafi had been cultivating the African states on Libya’s southern border—Sudan and, especially, Chad (the latter he invaded)—and he pointedly summed up Secretary Rice to Al Jazeera as a “darling black African woman.”
Yet even allowing for the grandiloquent quality of the Arabic language, and Qaddafi’s tendency to discuss subjects not traditionally associated with military dictators, his devotion to Rice was unmistakable. And so it was creepy, but not especially surprising, when Libyan rebels, ransacking the colonel’s private quarters in Tripoli last week, stumbled upon a scrapbook full of images of Rice, lovingly pasted on dozens of pages, like a schoolgirl’s Clark Gable album from the 1930s.
The pictures are mostly press photographs, including one where the Libyan dictator stands beside the secretary of state on her visit to Tripoli in 2008, the host encased in a flowing white robe with purple sash and his guest, slightly more businesslike, in a gray pinstriped suit with pearls.
The Scrapbook understands that all this must be somewhat embarrassing to Condoleezza Rice, who, as a distinguished scholar-diplomat who happens also to be an attractive woman, must occasionally put up with such nonsense. Needless to say, so far as we are aware, no female leader ever entertained such public or private thoughts about Warren Christopher or Colin Powell. But to give the colonel his due, at least his sentiments were ostensibly complimentary. The same can hardly be said for his repellent colleague in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, who never missed a chance to make disparaging sexual comments about Rice, or dismiss the Stanford provost/secretary of state as a “true illiterate.”
Still, you never know. Perhaps, when and if Bashar al-Assad of Syria is driven from power, and the rebels unlock his desk, a secret presidential diary will reveal that the tyrant and ophthalmologist longed to give -Secretary of State Hillary Clinton an eye exam.
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MLK, Made in China
This week saw the unofficial unveiling of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the National Mall. In an era where Al Sharpton hosts a nightly news show on MSNBC, The Scrapbook is happy in theory with the idea of MLK etched in stone as a permanent reminder of what a true civil rights leader looks like.
Unfortunately, just about everything about how King’s visage actually came to be placed on the Mall is troubling. The sculptor behind the memorial, Lei Yixin, happens to be a Chinese national, which raises some interesting questions, notes Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy:
The fact remains that Lei hails from a country that oppresses ethnic minorities, exploits its workers, and jails human-rights activists and the attorneys who try to defend them. In their day, King and civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall would likely have been taken by the Red Guard and never heard from again. . . . I also recall the words of a Chinese artisan who worked on the memorial with Lei. Asked why he was so delighted with being chosen for the job, the man told the Washington Post that he was in it for “national honor” and wanted to “bring glory to the Chinese people.” It just would have been kinda nice to hear an African American sculptor say something like that about this country.
The Scrapbook rarely finds itself in agreement with Milloy, but here we have to commend him for hitting the chisel on the head.
And one final regrettable thing must be said about the King memorial. We know the King family has endured much these many decades, but the family’s insistence on getting paid $800,000 from the nonprofit foundation responsible for building the memorial to use MLK Jr.’s words and likeness is appalling.
“I don’t think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family [or] any other group of family ancestors has been paid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington,” Cambridge University historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King, told the New York Post. “[King would’ve been] absolutely scandalized.”
The Guitar Police
There are few inventions that America has bequeathed to the world that have changed it more than the electric guitar. Rock music has played a significant role in cultural revolutions against oppressive governments, from the Czech Republic under communism to the burgeoning heavy metal scene in Tehran today. When governments start going after electric guitars, it’s never a good sign.
So if you were looking for a metaphor to suggest that the Obama administration hates freedom, it would be hard to top the Department of Justice’s raid on Gibson’s guitar plants in Nashville and Memphis last week. The company had to cease manufacturing while the government seized much of the wood the company uses to make its instruments.
Perhaps no electric guitar is more iconic than the Gibson Les Paul. Designed by musician and inventor Les Paul, Gibson’s guitar, along with the Fender Stratocaster, popularized the -solid-body electric guitar. Since then it’s been made famous by everyone from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Guns N’ Roses. Gibson also makes other legendary guitars, such as the 335 hollow body played by B. B. King, and the acoustic-electric played by John Lennon.
The making of electric guitars frequently involves the use of various exotic hardwoods. This raises some environmental concerns. In 2009, the DOJ, armed with automatic weapons, raided Gibson and seized significant quantities of the company’s wood. Nearly two years later, no charges have yet been filed related to the initial raid.
However, environmental concerns are only a tangential matter for the guitar police. Gibson is being investigated for violations of the Lacey Act, which was originally authored over a century ago to prevent trading of illegal animals and plants that have been illegally sold. Whether or not they’ve been “illegally” sold is determined by the laws of the country of origin for the plants and animals, and the Lacey Act is applicable only when a foreign law has been violated.
For its part, Gibson insists that the confiscated wood used by the company comes “from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier and is FSC Controlled, meaning that the wood complies with the standards of the Forest Stewardship Council, which is an industry-recognized and independent, not-for-profit organization established to promote responsible management of the world’s forests.”
Further, the company observes that the Lacey Act “reads that you are guilty if you did not observe a law even though you had no knowledge of that law in a foreign country.” Ignorance of the law may be no defense, but ignorance of the laws governing the harvesting of rosewood in a remote province of Eastern India (which may require that finishing be done by Indian rather than American workers) hardly seems like an excuse for a federal raid.
Gibson, like the proud American company it is, refuses to back down in the face of federal overreach.
The press release the company issued following the raid is both compelling and absolutely blistering. One week after the Obama administration announced it was launching a case-by-case review of 300,000 cases in already backlogged immigration courts, Gibson headlined their press release: “Gov’t says wood is illegal if U.S. workers produce it.” Ouch.
And when Gibson’s case gets more publicity, we trust the company will have more than enough defenders to force the Obama administration to back down.