WHIPPANY, N.J. — Unless she is named commissioner of the National Football League, a post for which she admits she is “campaigning shamelessly,” Condaleezza Rice will go to the White House with Texas Gov. George W. Bush if he is elected to the presidency.
Rice is Bush’s top foreign policy guru, and she will serve as his national security adviser.
For Rice — known as Condi — a professor of political science on leave from Stanford University since 1981, this would be a return to the National Security Council. She served under Gen. Brent Scowcroft during the senior George Bush administration, finishing up as head of the Russia desk at the NSC.
Rice hits the ground running, en route to an interview at the pro-Bush Wall Street Journal and then on to South Orange for a Jewish community “outreach,” followed by another fund-raiser.
But on the way, she took time out to talk to the Jewish press, on matters of concern to many U.S. Jews.
Rice visited Israel for the first time recently. It was seen as an important step for both external diplomatic and internal political reasons — even though the Bush campaign knows that come November, it will not capture a significant percentage of the American Jewish vote.
Israel, Rice says, “is maybe the most remarkable place I’ve ever been. It is extraordinary when you look at its small size carved in the middle of neighbors that certainly did not accept Israel’s existence at the beginning. You think that it had to be some incredible combination of the toughness of the people, the faith, willingness to sacrifice and the grace of God that made it survive to this day.”
The daughter and granddaughter of Presbyterian preachers, Rice describes herself as “a very religious person” and says, walking by the Sea of Galilee, she recognized “the tremendous link intertwining the Judeo-Christian heritage that was born there.”
She was also “really impressed with the vitality of what I would call a new Israel. I had dinner with a group of people from the software and high-tech industry, a lot of former Soviet Union people.”
Rice says she “spent a lot of time on the issue of Soviet Jewry when I was in the White House.”
Given the way President Bill Clinton went after the pro-Israel vote in 1992 — attacking then-president Bush and later GOP candidate Bob Dole, after he tried to pry the pro-Israel right from him in 1996 — the most amazing thing about George W.’s campaign has been the decision to keep itself out of the Middle East peace process.
During her prime time speech at the Republican national convention, Rice said Bush “has joined the bipartisan tradition of support for Israel’s quest for enduring peace with its neighbors.”
Not a lot of red meat there, she knows, and offers this explanation: “It is important even in a campaign to remember there’s one American government at a time…there are plenty of people out there looking for little cracks in the American body politic that can be exploited.”
Beyond that, Rice adds the view that Israel deserves U.S. support whether the peace-process train is rumbling along or not.
“I would hope that everybody understands that there are some principles that the governor applies when he thinks about the Middle East in general and Israel in particular,” Rice says. “First of all that Israel is a strategic ally and a friend, and you have a lot of strategic allies who are not friends and a few friends who are not necessarily strategic allies.
“But when you get one that’s both, that’s a very special relationship. And that means that you want to have the very best of circumstances for Israel. You want this period to unfold in a way that secures Israel and you have to trust Israel to make decisions about its own security.
“But I will tell you one thing: The governor believes that you do not just stand by Israel only when Israel is ‘taking risks for peace.’ You stand by Israel regardless, because Israel is a strategic ally and friend. However Israel determines or defines what it can do… you have to support it.”
Is Bush’s pledge not to try and influence Israeli politics realistic? After all, as president, his father did just that. “First of all,” she answers, “we can afford not to do it. Secondly, it’s morally right not to do it. And third, we are almost never successful at doing it anyway. I think some measure of self-restraint in this regard is probably a good idea,” Rice says.
An agreement has to be one reached by the parties and not one “sold” to them by Washington. But the United States “can broker, can mediate, can bring ideas, facilitate. But when it comes right down to it, the parties have to be committed to a deal that they really believe secures them,” Rice says.
Mideast peace has been a project of both major party’s administrations. “Every American president has felt that he added one piece of the puzzle,” she says, adding that a desire for peace in the Middle East has to come with an understanding that be on “a schedule that is consistent with the difficulties of the issues, not a personal agenda.”