Condi Rice’s Future Career As An Author

04 Dec, 2006 by John Hawkins

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I really don’t care much for this sort of mentality:

“As to whether the United States has made mistakes: of course, I’m sure we have,” Rice told interviewer Saad Sillawi of the Arabic satellite television station Al-Arabiya. “You can’t be involved in something as big as the liberation of a country like Iraq, and all that has happened since, and I’m sure there are things that we could have done differently.”

She told Sillawi, however, that the Bush administration is looking ahead, not backward.

“When I’m back at Stanford University,” she said, “I can look back and write books about what we might have done differently.”

It’s not that Condi Rice says that mistakes were made, it’s that she says that there have been so many of them that she’s going to be writing multiple books about it (as opposed to saying something like, let’s say, “I’ll be writing books about how we made it work even when people said it couldn’t be done.” ) It just sounds so defeatist, especially coming from the current Secretary of State.

Of course, what has Condi Rice accomplished as Secretary of State? A big bag of nothing. Yet, I guarantee you the book won’t be called, “20 Ways I Screwed Things Up In Iraq.” When these sort of after the fact memoirs come out, they’re always about what EVERYBODY ELSE did wrong. Here’s an idea, Condi: you’re in office right now, you’re the Secretary of State — why don’t you make sure things go right in Iraq and then you can write books about that when you get out.