WHAT AMERICA SEES:

Condiplomacy:
Travels with the new secretary of state. (Jonathan Karl, 04/04/2005, Weekly Standard)

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.
--George W. Bush, January 20, 2005

WHEN THE LEADING OPPOSITION FIGURE in Egypt was arrested on questionable charges in late January, Condoleezza Rice saw a perfect test of President Bush's inaugural promise to stand with democratic reformers around the world. Egyptian authorities jailed Ayman Nour just nine days after Bush's inaugural address. "They couldn't have picked a worse time to do this," Rice told Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council when she heard the news. Indeed. Rice first directed State Department spokesman Richard Boucher to make an uncharacteristically blunt statement. "We are concerned by the signal that the arrest sends," Boucher said, warning the Egyptians against "rough treatment" of Nour and noting, "He is one of Egypt's most prominent opposition leaders." Two weeks later, with Nour still in prison, Rice gave Hosni Mubarak's government the diplomatic equivalent of a kick in the teeth.

At the end of a meeting at the State Department with Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Gheit and a sizable contingent of Egyptian and U.S. officials, Rice made her move. She asked everybody--except Gheit, the Egyptian ambassador, and David Satterfield of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau--to leave the room. No note-takers, no posturing. Just blunt talk. "She shot him over Ayman Nour, just shot him," said a source familiar with the discussion. Rice's message was unambiguous: Nour's arrest threatened to poison U.S.-Egyptian relations. If he were not released, she warned, she might cancel plans for an upcoming trip to Cairo. Gheit said the Nour case was working its way through the Egyptian legal system and U.S. pressure would be unhelpful. This phase of the meeting lasted more than 20 minutes, as reporters waited for Rice, now uncharacteristically late, to appear at a joint press conference with Gheit. Stung by the bluntness of Rice's criticism, the Egyptians insisted she not mention Nour's name at the press conference.

She didn't have to say his name. When a reporter asked whether she had talked about Nour's imprisonment in the meeting, Rice avoided diplomatic niceties: "Yes, I did raise our concerns, our very strong concerns about this case," she said. "I did talk at some length about the importance of this issue to the United States, to the American administration, to the American Congress, to the American people." Visibly shaken, Gheit stood silently at Rice's side. Nour remained in jail, and Rice cancelled her long-planned trip to Egypt.

If her first months in office are any indication, Secretary Rice's State Department is going to be radically different from Colin Powell's.

One big thing she has going for her is that her peers are ill prepared for bluntness.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 29, 2005 12:00 AM