As US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice prepares to testify today before the 9/11 commission in the US, perhaps one of the most telling insights into her role in the White House has been given by former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, writes Mary Raftery
O'Neill was unceremoniously fired by George W. Bush in December 2002, after disagreeing with him about the scale of his tax cuts. O'Neill's observations on his two-year tenure as one of the most senior members of the Bush cabinet are contained in the recent book, The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind.
The former treasury secretary will be familiar to Irish people from his tour of African states in the company of Bono in May 2002. The pair were described around the world as "the odd couple", with Bono trying to convince the silver-haired, multimillionaire senior Republican businessman of the need for meaningful development aid for Africa.
O'Neill liked Condoleezza Rice, or "Condi" as she is known. He trusted her, he says, as an honest broker in foreign affairs, adjudicating between the hawkish Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the more dove-like Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
Nonetheless, O'Neill identifies Rice as one of the key movers in terms of the early plans to invade Iraq. At the very first meeting of Bush's National Security Council, just 10 days after his inauguration, the president announced that "Condi will run these meetings".
O'Neill says that it was at this particular meeting that the strategy on Iraq became apparent. After a discussion which culminated in the President's view that his administration would disengage from the Arab/Israeli peace process, O'Neill recalls how Bush turned to Rice and said: "So, Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?"
In what appeared to O'Neill and others present as a scripted exchange, Rice replied: "How Iraq is destabilising the region, Mr President." Director of the CIA George Tenet then pulled out a grainy aerial surveillance photograph of an Iraqi factory, which he said might be a chemical or biological weapons plant. Everyone in the room pored excitedly over the photograph. Little or no concrete evidence was ever produced, but as O'Neill states, the ground rules had now changed. Still barely days old, the Bush administration was ditching decades of engagement with the Arab-Israeli conflict. The target was now Iraq with its WMD. And this was long before 9/11.
In co-operating with Ron Suskind's book, Paul O'Neill turned over to him 19,000 documents relating to his time as treasury secretary. Some of these can be viewed on a number of websites, including Suskind's own.
The strategy was clear. According to Suskind, a document entitled "Plans for post-Saddam Iraq" dates from early 2001. Part of the planning concerned divvying up Iraqi oil once "regime change" had been achieved. In this context, one fascinating Pentagon document, dated March 5th, 2001, lists international interests in Iraq's oil, together with detailed maps showing areas of the country targeted for exploration. Ireland is even included on this list, in the form of the now-defunct company Bula, which is identified as having an interest in a large chunk known as Block 4. The chairman of Bula at the time was former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds.
Condoleezza Rice is herself of course a bit of an oil-woman. A former director of Chevron, she has even had a super-tanker named after her. Together with the Vice President, Dick Cheney, and his well-known connections with energy giant Halliburton, they form a solid area of influence in terms of the Bush administration's concentration on Iraq.
It is perhaps not surprising that she was "noncommittal" when Paul O'Neill returned from his tour of Africa with Bono, full of enthusiasm to improve US aid to developing countries. O'Neill had been deeply moved by what he had seen, but he recalls that Condi had little interest, and neither did the President.
O'Neill dispatched a memo to Bush in which he articulated a radically different approach to foreign policy from the sabre-rattling so favoured by the White House. "We were never going to dissuade countries from building destructive weapons and maybe aligning against us with just threats and force," O'Neill explains. He felt strongly that the US needed to "start treating much of the beleaguered developing world - the source of so many of the threats to our security - in a way that showed we valued and respected them".
To many Europeans, this is a statement of the blindingly obvious. However, within the White House, it was viewed as evidence that Paul O'Neill was increasingly out of line, that he had gone native. He in turn began to feel his days as treasury secretary were numbered. In the light of Condoleezza Rice's testimony today, it is worth recalling O'Neill's now famous description of Bush and his cabinet as being "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection".
As both O'Neill and now Richard Clarke spill the beans in recent books, at least we can rejoice in the fact that not all of them are dumb.