Pizza mogul Herman Cain has taken the GOP presidential campaign by storm in recent weeks, rising to the top of many state and national polls (recent sexual harassment scandals not withstanding). But despite his rise, Cain’s policies are certainly suspect, particularly his views on national security. Statements from Cain, like saying he’s not concerned about knowing who the president of “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan is, have led some Republicans to conclude that he’s not quite “ready for primetime,” but Cain insists he’s now a foreign policy expert.

But Cain’s latest gaffe — his indication that he doesn’t know China has nuclear weapons — got former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wondering yesterday on Laura Ingraham’s radio show about Cain’s foreign policy prowess:

INGRAHAM: What do you make of that comment? Is that accurate what he said about China?

RICE: Well no clearly he misspoke. It is obvious that China is increasing its military capability. They’ve built an aircraft carrier for the first time and that sort of thing. They have have been a nuclear power for quite a long time as a matter of fact that’s one reason that they are grandfathered under the nonproliferation treaty because they were a nuclear power before that treaty came in to being so…people misspeak and not everybody’s a foreign policy expert going in to a presidential campaign. [...]

Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt and say maybe it was misspoken but obviously if you’re going to run for president you’re eventually going to really have to know these things because China is a big challenge out there in a lot of important ways, including militarily.

Listen to the clip:

If anyone knows anything about presidential candidates not knowing anything about foreign policy, it’s Rice — and that didn’t work out so well.

Condoleezza Rice continued her book tour this week talking with Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin. Rogin pushed Rice to share her reflections on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and surprisingly, the former Secretary of State chose to distance herself from the right-wing talking point that the end of year troop withdrawal from Iraq will dangerously strengthen Iran’s regional influence.

The go-to criticism leveled by GOP hawks doesn’t hold much water with Rice. She told Rogin:

The Iraqis are good armed forces; they’re buying a lot of our equipment. I think they’ll be able to defend themselves. They continue to need help on the counterterrorism side, and it would have been a good message to Iran. Although I think it’s easy to overstate the degree to which the Iraqis have any attraction to Iran — that’s a pretty lousy relationship, really.

Neocons and various Republicans harshly criticized President Obama for announcing that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year. Fred and Kimberly Kagan wrote that “it will unquestionably benefit Iran.” Newt Gingrich told an audience, “Don’t kid yourself, it is defeat. Iran is stronger.” Rick Santorum claimed “Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government.” And the Bill Kristol “letterhead organization,” the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) wrote, in anticipation of a withdrawal, that the U.S. must maintain a strong presence in Iraq to “help ensure Iraq remains oriented away from Iran and a long-term ally of the United States.”

While neoconservatives and GOP presidential hopefuls are eager to suggest that the Obama administration’s withdrawal from Iraq — in conformity with the Status Of Forces Agreement negotiated and signed by Bush — is a major win for Iran, the former Secretary of State is clearly not buying it.

The headlines about Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir have mostly focused on the tit-for-tat between the former Secretary of State and former Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Rice called naive and said claims about her in Cheney’s memoir were an “attack on my integrity.” But the reality is that Cheney and Rice see eye-to-eye on some big issues too. Talking with USA Today about the book, Rice, like Cheney, credited President Bush for the Arab Spring:

The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that,” Rice says.

Indeed, Cheney had a similar take. When asked about the Arab Spring in August, Cheney replied, “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.” And of course, according to Rice, the only to get rid of Saddam Hussein was to invade militarily:

“It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. [...]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.”

There isn’t any real evidence of this claim that Bush’s democracy promotion in the Middle East (i.e. invasion of Iraq) had something to do with the Arab Spring. And this claim also ignores the agency of Arab citizens themselves in their collective action to rise up against social and economic injustices.

A 2010 RAND report found that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.” And now, ironically, the Iraqi government is “offering key moral and financial support” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists there.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook addressed this question back in July. “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas,” he said, adding, “There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship.” (HT: The Hill)

Luckily for President Bush, he had five former top officials from his administration on the Sunday shows yesterday defending his torture program and giving him credit for the current President killing Osama bin Laden. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice started the game earlier this week by claiming the Canadians supported Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (they didn’t) and yesterday on CNN, she said there was a “unit” dedicated to getting bin Laden “every single day” during Bush’s administration:

ZAKARIA: President Obama did say that he felt that the capture or killing of Bin Laden was not a top priority when he took office and he moved it to a top priority. What’s your reaction?

RICE: Oh, it was a top priority. We wanted to get Osama Bin Laden every single day. And there was a unit at the — the agency that worked on nothing else.

Watch it:

While it’s impossible to know what level of priority President Bush gave to nabbing bin Laden, he routinely said, even as early as March 2002, that he didn’t “spend that much time on him.” But if by “every single day” Rice meant, “every single day until late 2005″ then she would be correct because, as the New York Times reported in 2006, that’s when Bush closed the bin Laden unit in order to shift resources to Iraq:

The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed. [...]

The unit, known as Alec Station, was disbanded late last year and its analysts reassigned within the C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center, the officials said. [...]

In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.

And of course, President Obama ended to the war in Iraq and put resources back into getting bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview on 60 Minutes last night, “I brought [CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’” So actually making bin Laden a top priority seems to have worked out pretty well.

Last night, during a contentious interview with Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell wondered if Saddam Hussein “was the same threat to New Yorkers that Osama bin Laden was.” Rice came back with a former Bush official favorite: Well our Iraq war coalition was so awesome that at least SOME people thought he was a threat (see “you forgot Poland“).

O’Donnell noted the coalition Bush assembled didn’t exactly represent the full support of the international community, but in the fog of the interview’s back and forth, Rice just started adding countries that weren’t even part of the coalition:

RICE: So the Georgians who went there and the Japanese who went there and others –

O’DONNELL: Actually had soldiers firing weapons on the ground?

RICE: This was not part of the coalition. The people who — the British and the Australians and the Poles and all of those who — the Canadians, all of those who were ultimately in Iraq, these were not part of the coalition?

Watch it, starting at 5:22:

This must be news to the Canadians. While Canada did participate in reconstruction projects after the war began, the Canadian government led by Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Chrétien did not support the decision to invade. But seeing that Dr. Rice has never made a mistake in her life, perhaps it’s the facts that are wrong in this case.

Former Bush national security adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been on a tour of the media lately, eager to promote her recently released memoir.

On Tuesday, she appeared on Fox New’s The O’Reilly Factor. While most of Rice’s media tour has been focused on her childhood and upbringing, O’Reilly took the opportunity to ask her about her views on contemporary events. He asked Rice if the if the world is a “more dangerous place two years after” she left office. Rice replied that she thinks in the Bush administration made the world a safer place:

O’REILLY: Before we get to your book, Madam Secretary, is the world a more dangerous place two years after you left office?

RICE: The world was most dangerous in 2001, when we didn’t have a net to deal with terrorism. I think in that sense we made it a safer place from the time that we were in office. But Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon. That’s more dangerous. North Korea seems somewhat unstable with nuclear capability. That makes the world more dangerous. But, in fact, you’re always dealing with circumstances that are very difficult for a United States that has to lead.

Watch it:

While Rice may claim that Bush administration policies made the world a “safer place” from terrorism, the facts tell a different story. In 2007, terrorism experts and research fellows at Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank conducted a survey of terrorism incidents worldwide since the Bush administration-led U.S. war in Iraq. Their study found that terrorism incidents worldwide increased by seven times, or six hundred percent, since the Bush administration invaded Iraq.

More recently, researchers Robert Pape of the University of Chicago and James Feldman of Air Force Institute of Technology found that, “from 1980-2003, there were 350 suicide attacks in the world, only 15% of which were anti-American.” Yet after the Bush-led war in Iraq, “there have been 1,833 suicide attacks, 92% of which were anti-American.”

It should be noted that the Bush administration was well aware that its war against Iraq could lead to greater terrorism. A recently declassified State Department memo shows that the administration was privately worried that the war would “bring radicalization of British Muslims, the great majority whom opposed the September 11 attacks but are increasingly restive about what they see as an anti-Islamic campaign.” In July 2005, British Muslim extremists apparently radicalized by the war in Iraq detonated bombs throughout London, confirming the administration’s fears.