A star that never waxed

Here's a long New York Times profile of a supposedly "reflective" Condi Rice. Even while being somewhat critical it shows the extent to which the Washington foreign affairs press corps has pulled its punches on Rice. Not least because several of them are writing books about her and so need the access. One wades through the article and never sees her single biggest failure mentioned: 9/11. Her job was national security adviser. The person who "advises" the president on "national security", if you will.

So surely the first candidate to get fired if there's a catastrophic breakdown in national security. Which there was. It was Condi who called off Bill Clinton's targeting of Osama bin Laden in Spring 2001 on the ground that it wasn't part of a strategy. It was Condi who went to the Genoa summit that summer, the summit ringed with anti-aircraft missiles because the Italians thought that someone might use a plane as a weapon to attack the summit. And then claimed after 9/11 that no one could have conceived of a plane as a weapon. And it was Condi who spent that lazy August of 2001 on trips to Crawford and never got through to her boss that the system was buzzing with word of a threat.