Revisiting A Preventable Disaster

I was wrong. I wrote in January that the Three Witches of Foggy Bottom
had been isolated and contained.This followed an earlier piece, last
November, which described Susan Rice. It looks as if the Obama
Administration still hasn't realised the depth of fuzzy thinking and
bias of the remaining Dynamic Duo.

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair"

*Dr. Gary K. Busch*

It looks as if U.S. foreign policy, especially towards Africa, is in the
process of change. The Three Witches of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment have been thwarted or restrained by the winds that have
blown in to the new Obama administration. Hillary Clinton has retired;
Susan Rice has been humiliated and reproached; and Samantha Power has
been isolated by the new array of Executive Cabinet appointees. The
Weird Sisters can bury their fiery cauldron at Foggy Bottom; put away
the eyes of newt and toes of frog and quietly move back into the shadows
where the fog of mist and darkness can mute their bloodthirsty calls for
'humanitarian intervention'; this humanitarian intervention which left
thousands of innocent Africans dead or displaced in the Ivory Coast,
Libya and the Eastern Congo. It was the direct intervention of these
three 'policy makers' that allowed a U.S. African policy in which the
bloody and indiscriminate attacks on civilians by the French, the UN,
Rwanda and Uganda were aided and abetted by a benighted U.S. foreign
policy of military intervention in the name of humanitarianism...

This followed an earlier piece, last November, which described Susan Rice.

A Preventable Disaster

*Dr. Gary K. Busch*

The election of President Obama to a second term will be very gratifying
to most of the leadership in Africa and among the people of the
continent. However, this relief has been coupled with the increasing
fear that the position of Secretary of State being vacated by Hillary
Clinton might lead to her replacement by Susan Rice, the current UN
representative and former Assistant Secretary of State for African
Affairs. Her role in that position was a continuing disaster as far as
Africans were concerned and her legacy there is a tribute to just how
wrong U.S. policy can be in dealing with African affairs.

Rice is quite bright and has a solid academic record, starting when she
was part of Condoleeza Rice's entourage at Stanford. Later, as a Rhodes
Scholar at Oxford she turned her attention to Africa and completed her
dissertation on post-independence Zimbabwe, with an analysis which was
founded on pursuing Cold War values in dealing with African problems and
a deep-seated antipathy towards ZANU-PF and Robert Mugabe. She has
always shown the value of her academic training but her actual
experiences and participation in events have never impinged on her
consciousness or ideology in any meaningful way. Her reliance on her
academic training has always revealed itself in her inflexible manner,
inexperience with non-academic political interactions and in an
unwarranted arrogance that pervades most of her interactions.

Susan Rice is best remembered in Africa as a genocide denier in the
Rwandan Genocide where she refused to admit that the genocide was taking
place even though she knew better. She refused to act or bring the facts
to Congress and the public for action because she was concerned about
Congressional elections in the US. When the armed forces of Rwanda and
Uganda attacked Zaire she supported and abetted the invasion of the
country. She grew close to Museveni of Uganda and Kagame of Rwanda. When
these two leaders continued their struggle in the Democratic Republic of
the Congo ('DRC') under its new leader, Kabila, even after Mobutu had
been driven from office, Susan Rice was their major cheerleader.

As the Ugandan and Rwandan armies occupied Eastern Congo and engaged in
open warfare with the new DRC Government Rice continued to support their
efforts and offered US diplomatic and barely-cloaked military support.
Her arrogance was unbounded. She was sent on a mission in 1999 to visit
Kinshasa to discuss the US position on the war with Kabila. On her way
to Kinshasa she stopped first at Kigali to meet Kagame and then in
Entebbe to meet Museveni. She then cabled to Kabila that she was ready
to be received in the DRC

I was in Kinshasa at the time with my partner and colleague,
Pierre-Victor Mpoyo, an important minister and leader in the DRC. I went
with him and Kabila to N'Djili Airport to meet Susan Rice. Kabila, to
everyone's amusement greeted Rice as she descended from the plane saying
"I greet you Madame Rice, as the Ambassador from Uganda"; for that was
in effect what she was. Rice spent her time lecturing Kabila about how
awkward it made US foreign policy when Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe
troops assisted the DRC in repelling the Ugandan and Rwandan invasion of
the DRC and the rape and plunder they were causing in the Kivus and
Kasai. Rice was happy to see the war against the DRC as US African
policy had always shunned Angola and Zimbabwe because they were not
allied inflexibly to the US in their Cold War struggle with Russia and
China.

This predilection for Uganda and Rwanda and contempt and hostility
toward Zimbabwe continues to this day. The fact that both Uganda and
Rwanda still occupy parts of the DRC and pillage its resources and
massacre its citizens doesn't seem to bother her. These two nations now
are part of the US proxy army in Africa and receive her full support at
the United Nations.

In 1996 key elements in the Sudan Government had told the US that they
were willing to give up Osama Bin Laden. Madeleine Albright and US
Ambassador Tim Carney agreed to the suggestion that they intervene to
curb Bin Laden's training camps in Sudan. Susan Rice and Richard Clarke
(the counter-terrorism chief) lobbied against conducting any action
against Bin Laden. Bin Laden was allowed to leave Sudan unimpeded. Her
only other claim to fame was her ill-fated visit to Nigeria in July 1998
when she visited the imprisoned Mashood Abiola in jail where he suffered
a fatal heart attack during her visit. She has always denied that she
had any role in Abiola's demise despite the rumours and gossip.

Beyond her disastrous role in Africa, Susan Rice has an almost
equivalent role in opposition to Israel. Rice has shown a consistent
anti-Israel bias at the United Nations. She absented herself from the UN
Security Council in 2011 when the U.S. opposed Palestinian efforts to
declare statehood at the United Nations in order to tape a session on
Jon Stewart's television show. She sent a deputy to do the hard work of
standing up for Israel. Rice's only defence is that she is frequently
absent from debates; among others the critically important first UN
Security Council meeting on Libya in February 2011.

She has a long history of dishonest spin on important events. During the
2008 elections, she denied that Obama had agreed to meet the leaders of
hostile nations, including Iran, without preconditions despite Obama's
evidence to the contrary. Her contribution to the debate over the recent
Benghazi murder of the Ambassador added to Obama's problems by fuelling
the Republican claims that the US was unprepared.

She is not held in high regard in Africa. She is distrusted in Israel.
She remains as aloof and arrogant as the first day she started in
government and remains an irritant to many who work or worked with her
at the UN, the State Department and the Congress. This includes the
Congressional Black Caucus who view her as antipathetic to their core
values. Surely this is preventable disaster. Obama must know that
appointing Susan Rice to Hillary's job will only bring grief, contempt
and confusion from those with whom she will interact.

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