In touting Rice's role in "strategic makeover" of Bush foreign policy, Time ignored Rice's own adherence to the "Bush doctrine," falsehoods on Iraq

In the cover story for the July 17 edition of Time magazine, titled "The End of Cowboy Diplomacy," White House correspondent Mike Allen and world editor Ramesh Ratnesar reported that "a strategic makeover" of the Bush administration's foreign policy "is evident in the ascendancy of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice," and that "Rice is a foreign policy realist, less inclined to the moralizing approach of the neoconservatives who dominated Bush's War Cabinet in the first term." However, Allen and Ratnesar's suggestion that the administration is moving away from the so-called "Bush doctrine" -- which they described as a "grand strategy to fight Islamic terrorists and rogue states by spreading democracy around the world and pre-empting gathering threats before they materialize" -- and toward of Rice's "realist" approach ignores Rice's central role in promoting the "Bush doctrine" and in particular her role in selling the Iraq war to the American people. In fact, the online version of Allen and Ratnesar's article linked to a Time article Ratnesar wrote nearly a year ago titled "The Condi Doctrine" (subscription required), which noted Rice's "commitment to the Bush doctrine."

Allen and Ratnesar wrote:

Nonetheless, a strategic makeover is evident in the ascendancy of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has tried to repair the Administration's relations with allies and has persuaded Bush to join multilateral negotiations aimed at defusing the standoffs with North Korea and Iran. By training and temperament, Rice is a foreign policy realist, less inclined to the moralizing approach of the neoconservatives who dominated Bush's War Cabinet in the first term. Her push for pragmatism has rubbed off on hawks like Vice President Dick Cheney, the primary intellectual force behind Bush's post-9/11 policies. "There's a move, even by Cheney, toward the Kissingerian approach of focusing entirely on vital interests," says a presidential adviser. "It's a more focused foreign policy that is driven by realism and less by ideology."

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The practical costs of the last plank of the Bush Doctrine -- unilateralism -- may have finally persuaded the Administration to jettison that too. This move is being led by Rice, who is emerging as Bush's most visible and intimate adviser. "The President is more willing to listen to arguments in favor of utilizing diplomacy as a tool to fight radical Islam when it comes from her, because he trusts her totally," says a presidential adviser. Rice appears to have won some internal arguments -- such as getting Bush to offer conditional direct talks to Iran and calling for the closure of Gitmo -- but she has yet to pull off any major diplomatic breakthrough that could burnish the Bush legacy.

The article's depiction of Rice as the "foreign policy realist" at odds with "the neoconservatives who dominated Bush's War Cabinet" ignored the role that Rice, who was Bush's national security adviser until she succeeded Colin Powell as secretary of state in 2005, played in the administration's efforts to gain public approval for the Iraq invasion. Her public posture at least was very much in line with those same neoconservatives in "Bush's War Cabinet." What became known as the "Bush doctrine" itself was first officially enunciated by the National Security Council in September 2002, when Rice was the national security adviser. It was Rice who famously declared on CNN on September 8, 2002, regarding Iraq's purported nuclear weapons program, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Rice also pushed one of the administration's more glaring falsehoods in the run-up to war with Iraq -- that Saddam Hussein had acquired aluminum tubes that were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs." As Media Matters for America noted, a New York Times investigation of the intelligence regarding the aluminum tubes concluded that nearly a year before Rice claimed on CNN that the tubes were intended for use in a nuclear weapons program, her "staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons."

In an October 1, 2002, speech, Rice broke down Bush's strategy to "create a balance of power that favors freedom" into three statements: "We will defend the peace by opposing and preventing violence by terrorists and outlaw regimes. We will preserve the peace by fostering an era of good relations among the world's great powers. And we will extend the peace by seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe."

Rice also defended the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program, telling NBC's Tim Russert on the December 18, 2005, broadcast of Meet the Press, "The president is acting under his constitutional authority, under statutory authority." Rice did not elaborate on Bush's alleged constitutional and statutory authority but instead told Russert three times: "I'm not a lawyer."

Indeed, Ratnesar's own article from the August 15, 2005, edition of Time noted Rice's "commitment to the Bush doctrine," and the uneasiness that commitment was fostering among her own supporters. According to Ratnesar:

Even some of Rice's supporters wonder whether her commitment to the Bush doctrine is impairing her judgment -- not just about the scale of the U.S.'s problems in Iraq, but also about the wisdom of pinning so much hope on the idea that bringing democracy to societies that have never known it is the best strategy for making Americans safer. Rice has never been patient: as an aide to Brent Scowcroft in the first Bush Administration, she chafed at Scowcroft's cautious steps to encourage democratization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But the East European model can't easily be replicated in the Islamic world. From the Palestinian territories to Pakistan -- and even in Iraq -- holding free elections now would probably produce governments that are even less amenable to the U.S.'s overriding goal of stamping out Islamic radicalism. "The biggest problem I have with Condi and the Middle East," says the Republican elder statesman, "is that she really has drunk the democratic-transformation Kool-Aid."