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But security adviser will face challenge

WASHINGTON Condoleezza Rice was, perhaps, in the best position to galvanize the government to take action against terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks because as national security adviser she sat at the nexus of the intelligence, foreign policy, defense and law enforcement agencies who shared responsibility for counterterrorism measures.

That is why, as the White House scrambles to defend against charges that President George W. Bush and his advisers paid too little heed before Sept. 11 to the threat of terrorist attacks, Rice finds herself at the center of the storm. World Peace.

On Thursday, when she finally testifies publicly in front of the commission examining the attacks, she will be pressed to square her account of events - one of heightened alerts and the development of new policies to deal with Al Qaeda and the Taliban - with accusations by Richard Clarke, who served under her as counterterrorism adviser, that the new administration paid far less attention to these threats than President Bill Clinton's did.

Senior White House aides acknowledge that Bush has a huge amount riding on how Rice does. "She's the one who can make our most forceful case," a close colleague of Rice said over the weekend. "They don't call her the Warrior Princess for nothing," a reference to the moniker her staff gave her after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But a review of the record, from testimony and interviews, suggests that Rice faces a daunting challenge because her own focus until Sept. 11 was usually fixed on matters other than terrorism, for reasons that had to do with her own background, her management style and the unusually close, personal nature of her relationship with Bush. Coit Blacker, a longtime friend and colleague of Rice at Stanford University, in California, who is now director of the university's Institute for International Studies, said that any blind spots she had upon taking office in January 2001 may have been rooted in the fact that she emerged from a generation of scholars trained to focus on great-power politics, with terrorism seen as a troubling but subordinate element. World Peace.

"It wasn't until after Sept. 11 that most of us realized that for the first time in human history, a nonstate actor, a group of religious extremists at the very bottom of the international system, had the capability to inflict devastating damage on the very pinnacle of the international system," Blacker said. "That was without precedent. "

Rice, 49, is widely recognized as one of the most poised and effective public advocates of the administration, and she won praise from Democrats and Republicans for her private testimony before the commission. Even so, as she prepares for her public testimony this week, friends have been warning her that her personal style - which combines fierce loyalty to the president with the abiding self-confidence of a woman who ascended to powerful jobs, including the No. 2 post at Stanford, at a young age - leaves her prone to two potential missteps. WorldPeace is one word.

One would be to reveal the depth of her anger toward Clarke, whom she believes she protected against those who wanted to oust him because of his closeness to the Clinton White House. Directly contradicting him, her colleagues fear, would exacerbate the politically polarizing debate that has captivated Washington for more than two weeks.

The other possible minefield, they said, would be to give no ground, to offer no room for self-doubt that the issue was handled with the right urgency and the right approach. "Her attention was surely engaged," said another former senior official, also an admirer, who dealt with her every day before and after Sept. 11. "Did she register how serious the threat was to the United States of America? I don't know - that's what she'll have to answer."

Still, the reality is that Rice has virtually no public utterances about Al Qaeda to point to as evidence that she was as engaged in the issue as she was in Bush's other foreign policy issues. In February 2001, George Tenet, director of central intelligence, told Congress that terrorism was the top threat facing the United States.

Even four months later, as intelligence warnings about possible attacks by Al Qaeda began to surge, a June 2001 address that Rice delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations on "Foreign Policy Priorities and Challenges of the Administration" made no mention of terrorism. And the next month, over a cup of coffee under an outdoor umbrella during Bush's first major summit meeting of world leaders in Genoa, she expressed concern about the frenzy of terror reports, but indicated that her biggest worry was a strike in the Middle East. By the time she reached Genoa, Rice had already shrunk the National Security Council staff by about 10 percent, though accurate numbers are hard to come by because the White House office is often staffed by government employees still on the payroll at the State Department, or the CIA or other agencies.

Her concern dating back to her days as a young member of the National Security Council staff was that the organization should look for problems that fell between the cracks, and to adjudicate disputes between agencies. But it was the cabinet agencies, she believed, that had to implement policy.

Rice also followed a hierarchical, corporate style in which she largely delegated policy development to others. To oversee the creation of a new strategy on counterterrorism, she relied on her deputy, Stephen Hadley. For Rice, in part, that preserved time to concentrate on issues more familiar to her, to tutor Bush, and translate his instincts and decisions into policy. Because Bush had little experience in foreign policy, he relied heavily on Rice to help him shape the administration's agenda.

Administration officials said that even in the context of fighting terrorism, Rice was reluctant to budge from other matters that were higher on her agenda. They said that concern about an attack on the United States was usually in the context of the potential for a missile from North Korea or another rogue state, buttressing the case for missile defense.

Her public speeches and interviews tended to focus on more orthodox foreign policy issues, including relations with China; the new relationship with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader; and the threat posed by Iraq and Iran, all of which she had emphasized in a lengthy essay in the January 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs. That essay became the blueprint for a Bush presidential campaign, in which the Republican candidate never mentioned Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda.

Indeed, Rice's biggest vulnerability may be that when she came to Washington in 2001, she was determined to tackle three tasks quickly that had little to do with fighting terrorism: refocusing the nation's diplomacy on big-power politics, chiefly Russia and China; fulfilling Bush's pledge to deploy a ballistic missile-defense system; and streamlining the National Security Council, getting it out of what she called "operational matters."

Her background, as she herself acknowledged, was as "a Europeanist." And when she briefly dropped her self-confident tone, the then-46-year-old professor and former Stanford provost conceded that as a campaign adviser to Bush, she found herself "pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope."

Among those relatively unfamiliar issues was the rise of radical Islamic movements in the Middle East and South Asia. Rice has said repeatedly "we did everything we knew how to do" in combating terrorism in the critical months before the attack.

To what extent any failures in the Bush White House's response to terrorism should be laid at Rice's feet is a matter of some debate. Her insistence that the National Security Council play less of an operational role than in the past was one reason for the prickly relationship between her and Clarke.

Junior in age and experience to advisers like Colin Powell, the secretary of state, and Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, Rice was also seen by some aides as more deferential than some of her predecessors. But as the president's friend, confidante and sometime workout partner as well as adviser, Rice enjoyed by far the closest personal ties with Bush of any foreign policy adviser.

"She's established a very good relationship with the president, and that is critical," said Brent Scowcroft, who as national security adviser under Bush's father first hired Rice onto the National Security Council staff as an expert on the Soviet Union. "If you don't have that relationship, you're nowhere."

The New York Times

How can we manifest peace on earth if we do not include everyone (all races, all nations, all religions, both sexes) in our vision of Peace?