Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said on Wednesday that she would have a hard time supporting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice as the next Secretary of State because she is concerned about Rice’s credibility in the aftermath of presenting what turned out to be an inaccurate portrayal of the Sept. 11 Benghazi terror attacks. Yet, Collins was not at all concerned about President Bush’s decision to nominate Condoleezza Rice as the nation’s top diplomat, despite her role in presenting false information that provided the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Appearing on CNN, Collins hammered home various GOP talking points about concerns that Rice may have acted overly political in providing an overview of the Obama administration’s knowledge in the aftermath of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and said that damaged Rice’s credibility to be the top State Department official:

COLLINS: It’s important that the secretary of state enjoy credibility around the world with Congress and here in our country as well. And I am concerned that Susan Rice’s credibility may have been damaged by the misinformation that was presented that day. That’s one reason, as I said, that I wish she had just told the White House no, you should send a political person to be on those Sunday shows.

Watch it:

Collins’ statements throughout the day on Wednesday, on CNN and elsewhere, leave several questions unanswered. The first is why the focus on a nominee’s judgement is so much more important now than in 2004 and 2005. Shortly after President Bush nominated Condoleezza Rice to be the next Secretary of State in November, 2004, Collins praised the move, saying Bush “made a very good choice.” Collins, in turn, voted for her confirmation along with almost all of her Republican colleagues.

Condoleezza Rice had spent many months prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq convincing the public of the threat that Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program presented to the United States, including famously stating that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” Her statements led the U.S. into a war in Iraq that will end up costing the U.S. trillions of dollars and leaving tens of thousands dead or wounded. We knew by the time Condoleezza Rice was nominated that there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Another question to ask is why Rice’s name is now being brought up in relation to a set of Embassy bombings from 14 years ago. Collins earlier on Wednesday said, “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department.”
Read more

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) appeared on CNN Wednesday morning to press his case against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, the target of Republican criticism for initially claiming that the Sept. 11 attacks on Benghazi were inspired by spontaneous protests to an anti-Islamic video. Burgess joined 97 House Republicans in opposing Rice’s potential nomination to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, even though her public statements about the incident originated from unclassified talking points provided by the intelligence community.

Host Soledad O’Brien challenged Burgess’ opposition to Susan Rice, noting that Republicans had supported Condoleezza Rice’s nomination as Secretary of State in 2005, despite the Bush administration’s role in the massive intelligence failures that led to the Iraq war. Burgess struggled to explain the contradiction. He initially claimed that the media was far more critical of Bush’s intelligence failures than Obama, but when O’Brien laughed away that claim, he told her to take up the question with Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), both of whom supported Condoleezza but now oppose Susan:

O’BRIEN: I have asked others before how this does not compare, the Susan Rice issue, to the Condoleezza Rice issue on weapons of mass destruction. She was also wrong when she was the national security adviser, right? … Fast forward three years in 2005 when she was up to be secretary of state, it was Lindsey Graham who was furious that the Democrats were pushing back. It was Sen John mccain who were furious that the Democrats were pushing back on Condoleezza Rice to be Secretary of State. She was wrong on weapons of mass destruction. How is this different?

BURGESS: The difference is the scrutiny provided by our free press in this country. Condoleezza Rice was exposed to withering criticism by the press. I don’t see that happening now. Maybe I’ve missed something in the talking points, but I don’t see that happening. ….

O’BRIEN: So you’re confusing me there for a moment. When you say the scrutiny on the press — are you saying five days after comments of weapons of mass destruction, you feel like the media was picking apart Condoleezza Rice? I don’t think that’s true, Sir. Most people say that’s not the case. It took a long time. …. Hey, I’m all about scrutiny. I guess I like consistency, too. You were not calling for more scrutiny and you weren’t saying that the fact that Condoleezza Rice was wrong on weapons of mass destruction was going to damage her credibility as secretary of state. Again, McCain and Lindsey Graham were supporting that. It seems contradictory to me.

BURGESS: You’ll have to take that up with Senator McCain and Senator Graham.

Watch it:

Indeed, the media largely accepted Bush’s argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and rarely aired dissident voices or challenged the administration’s allegations.

The very same Republicans who advanced these false claims and remained silent after it became obvious that the Bush administration molded intelligence to substantiate war with Iraq, are now criticizing Susan Rice’s performance. The Obama administration has changed its assessment of the events that led up to the Libya incident as the intelligence evolved.

During a press conference today, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made it clear why he will oppose U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice becoming Secretary of State: the war in Iraq.

During the press conference, Graham and fellow Republican senators John McCain and Kelly Ayotte called for a Select Committee to investigate the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya and Graham said he wouldn’t vote for Rice to become Secretary of State, arguing that her handling of the Benghazi attacks is similar to when the Bush administration misled the American public on the course of the war in Iraq:

GRAHAM: Somebody has got to start paying a price around this place. And back to the Bush administration. When we went to Iraq, we came back and said there are more than a few dead-enders. What they’re telling you, the Bush administration, about the level of security in Iraq doesn’t match what we see. And I voted against General Casey, because I didn’t think he deserved to be promoted after the way he did his job in Iraq. I don’t think that she deserves to be promoted. There are a lot of qualified people in this country the president could pick. But I am dead-set in making sure that we don’t promote anyone that was involved in the Benghazi debacle.

Watch Graham’s statement here:

But of course Graham’s comparison between the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq and the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi makes no sense. On the one hand, Bush administration officials, despite the obvious evidence, were saying the situation in Iraq was better than it was (one Bush official even admitted the administration was looking at Iraq through “rose colored glasses”). By contrast, the investigation into what happened in Benghazi is ongoing. When Ambassador Rice spoke to the public on Sept. 16, she presented the intelligence community’s initial assessment with a strong dose of hedging and provisos that the description of events may change as facts emerge. Rice was using available information to explain what happened. For that, Graham, McCain and others in the GOP have relentlessly attacked Susan Rice to tar her as being untrustworthy. President Obama, while not ruling out whether he would nominate, hit back against McCain and Graham for attacking Rice during this afternoon’s press conference.

And in terms of voting for a cabinet member with questionable credentials, back in 2005, Graham and McCain themselves were singing a different tune. They defended President Bush’s nomination of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State despite her central role in spreading the false intelligence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction.

President Obama has yet to nominate anyone to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, but Republicans are already lining up in opposition to potential replacement U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, citing her complicity in the administration’s alleged failures in responding to the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

On Wednesday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) promised to filibuster Rice’s nomination and “do whatever to block the nomination that is within our power.” “She’s not qualified,” McCain explained, arguing that she misled the public by initially attributing the September 11 Benghazi attack to protests over an anti-Islam video. He claimed that at a minimum, Rice is guilty of “not being very bright, because it was obvious that this was not a ‘flash mob’ and there was additional information by the time she went on every news show…in America.”

But interestingly, McCain took a far different approach to another Rice in 2005. When President George W. Bush nominated National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to the post, McCain defended the nomination, despite Rice’s central role in spreading the false intelligence that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. The Democrats held hours of hearing and ultimately confirmed Rice, but not before McCain accused the opposition of using politics to delay her confirmation and challenging her “integrity”:

McCAIN: Condoleezza Rice is a great American success story. This is what America is all about. A young woman who grew up in a segregated part of America where Americans were not treated equally, to rise to the position of secretary of state. We should have been celebrating, I believe, this remarkable American success story.

Also, I thought that some of the remarks — and I’m not going to mention my colleagues’ names — some of the remarks aimed at her during the hearings challenged her integrity. We can disagree on policy and we disagree on a lot of things, but I think it is very clear that Condoleezza Rice is a person of integrity. And yes, I see this, some lingering bitterness over a very tough campaign. I hope it dissipates soon.

“I can only conclude we’re doing this for no other reason than because of lingering bitterness at the outcome of the elections,” McCain told CBS Morning News on January 27, 2005.

Seven years later, there is no evidence that Susan Rice mislead the public, yet McCain is leading the charge to oppose her. Rice was “speaking from a set of talking points provided by the U.S. intelligence community, which was also provided to Congress. The video has also been cited by those on the ground as being an impetus for the attack in recent weeks, challenging the Republican narrative.”

During a press conference on Wednesday, Obama defended Rice, saying that the has “done exemplary work.” Rice “gave her best understanding of the intelligence that had been provided to her,” he said, adding that for McCain “to go after the U.N. ambassador who had nothing to do with Benghazi, who was giving a presentation based on the intelligence she had received…is outrageous.”

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice broke with the majority of her party last night on Fox News, as she tried to hit the brakes on the right wing’s politicization of the recent attack in Libya.

Host Greta Van Susteren asked Rice directly and repeatedly about a set of emails uncovered by Reuters. In what has been dubbed “Benghazi-Gate,” the conservative media has jumped on the emails as definitive proof that the Obama administration has been lying about what it knew and when in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi. Rice’s response was likely not what Van Susteren expected:

RICE: But when things are unfolding very, very quickly, it’s not always easy to know what is really going on on the ground. And to my mind, the really important questions here are about how information was collected. Did the various agencies really coordinate and share intelligence in the way that we had hoped, with the reforms that were made after 9/11?

So there’s a big picture to be examined here. But we don’t have all of the pieces, and I think it’s easy to try and jump to conclusions about what might have happened here. It’s probably better to let the relevant bodies do their work.

Watch Rice’s full interview here:

Throughout the interview, Rice highlighted the difficulty that comes in a “fog of war” situation, with multiple stories coming in which need to be processed and verified. Her statements strongly align with the evolution of the Obama administration’s understanding of what happened in Benghazi. Rice also joined current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in dismissing the big picture importance of the emails from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, as a small portion of the overall communication between the mission and the State Department.

With her reasoned response, Rice stands apart from other former Bush administration officials, including former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both Rumsfeld and Bolton have repeatedly insisted that the Obama administration has performed a cover-up of the events in Benghazi.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) recently appointed retired General Tommy Franks, who was responsible for some of the greatest failures in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, to be a top military adviser. That’s par for the course for the Romney campaign, which is littered with planners, organizers, and boosters of the Iraq war.

Romney’s support from the Iraq war’s lead planners reaches to the top. Most of the war’s key players who aren’t advising Romney have strongly come out in support him, lending the imprimatur of their foreign policy instincts to his campaign. Here are some of the key endorsements of Romney or his foreign policy:

DICK CHENEY

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, decisions as the commander in chief, who has the responsibility for sending our young men and women in harm’s way – that man’s Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ : “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

DOUGLAS FEITH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “The Obama administration has gone out of its way to try to deemphasize the ideological part of the problem, and to define the conflict as a conflict that the United States has with an organization and its affiliates, rather than an international movement tied together by an ideology. I think Romney did a pretty good job in making it clear that the problem is broader than Al Qaeda.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11.”

DONALD RUMSFELD

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at [the Virginia Military Institute]. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.”

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

GEORGE W. BUSH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “I’m for Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Mission accomplished.”

Today on CBS’s morning show, former Bush administration Secretary of State and top Mitt Romney surrogate Condoleezza Rice could not offer any specific foreign policy failures made by President Obama. Romney’s allies, led by Rice and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), are expected to attack Obama on national security grounds tonight in at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

But when asked to offer specifics this morning on CBS, all Rice could come up with was some vague attack on Obama’s Syria policy, which, host Norah O’Donnell noted, the president himself might agree with:

O’DONNELL: Can you be specific about somewhere where you think President Obama has failed on foreign policy.

RICE: What we should do tonight, is talk about what a President Romney would mean for America. It’s not a time to look back, it’s a time to look forward. We have real challenges out there, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Europe, with our allies.

O’DONNELL: But if President Obama isn’t doing anything wrong, then why change things?

RICE: It’s a question of what a President Romney would do and there is no doubt that the United States’ voice has been muted and when the United States’ voice is muted the world is a more dangerous place.

O’DONNELL: How is the United States’ voice muted?

RICE: Just look at the situation in Syria for instance. We have a circumstance in which Assad is butchering his people. The Iranians are helping him to do so. The United States seems to be mired in the Security Council. The Russians and the Chinese say no, no, no and we don’t have an answer. When that is the case, it’s a dangerous place. …

O’DONNELL: But I think the president agrees with that as well. Having covered the White House, the question is whether … a President Romney would be willing to advocate and commit American troops, American lives, in a place like Syria right now.

Watch the clip:

So despite the fact that the GOP plans to attack Obama’s foreign policy, Rice has no interest in “looking back.” Instead, she said, she wants to “look forward,” yet she doesn’t have any idea what Romney’s international agenda is either. And on Syria, it turns out that the policy Romney has articulated thus far isn’t much different from the Obama administration’s.

But as far as attacking Obama on foreign policy grounds goes, the Republicans are going to have a tough time. Poll after poll shows that Americans favor Obama over Romney in handling international issues. And the Wall Street Journal noted today that their recent poll “found 54% of voters approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of foreign policy, his highest score in more than a year and far better than what either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton fetched as they sought re-election.”

Bush Administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today couldn’t give a definitive answer when asked how Mitt Romney’s foreign policy would differ from President Obama’s. On CBS this morning, host Charlie Rose pressed Rice — who has endorsed Romney for president — on the issue, but Rice responded only with platitudes about more understanding and “greater freedom”:

ROSE: Will his foreign policy be different from the foreign policy of President Obama?

RICE: What Mitt Romney will bring to the presidency — and I believe he will be a very good president — is that he will bring first and foremost an understanding of the role the United States has to play in the world.

He understands the essence of an America that believes in free markets and free peoples that has really been the reason the world has been moving toward greater prosperity and greater freedom.

He understands that we need to reassure our friends that indeed we’re going to be with them and that our foes have to respect and indeed fear us. He has those principles and those values and he’ll be very good on the foreign policy stage.

Watch the clip:

Indeed, behind the scenes, Romney’s foreign policy looks like it is shaking up to be George W. Bush part two. However, in public, the former Massachusetts governor seems apprehensive about diverting too far from Obama. As the Los Angeles Times noted last month, “for all his criticisms of the president, it has been difficult to tell exactly what Romney would do differently” on foreign policy.

On ABC’s This Week, former George W. Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dinged the sometimes goofy, gaffe-prone foreign policy of Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain. Asked by host Christiane Amanpour about Cain’s seeming ignorance, and in particular the now-infamous “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan” gaffe, Rice responded with a chuckle that those sorts of comments weren’t the sort of things you like to hear out of a presidential candidate’s mouth:

AMANPOUR: [I]n this particular campaign, [Republicans] all seem like they’re rushing for the exits when it comes to foreign policy. Or, in the case of Herman Cain, kind of making fun of a lack of knowledge — I mean, he did the whole “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan.” Do you find that a little cavalier?

RICE: Well, I think in retrospect it probably wasn’t a great thing to say if you’re running for president. And foreign policy ought to be more a part of the debate than it is, because we’re so interconnected.

Watch the video:

Amanpour also brought up Cain’s statement this week that China’s “indicated that they’re trying to develop nuclear capability,” when, as Amanpour put it, “obviously we all know China has been a nuclear power since the 1960s.” Last week Rice said “not everybody’s a foreign policy expert” when asked to comment on Cain’s China claim. But today when Amanpour asked if she was “alarmed” by the gaffe, the former Secretary of State demurred and said Cain might have misspoke — a suggestion that left Amanpour incredulous. “Christiane, I wasn’t listening and I really don’t know,” said the former Secretary of State. “It concerns me that we are not having a discussion about foreign policy.”