COOLING ON CONDI

For some time now, I’ve been telling you that Condi Rice may replace Dick Cheney (who would step down for “health reasons”) as Bush’s Vice-President, putting her in the catbird seat for the GOP presidential nomination in ’08. I expect this to take place by summer 2006.

As I discussed last month in 44, her candidacy would be do more damage to the Democrat Party than Katrina did to the Gulf Coast. She is the only candidate the GOP can put up who could defeat Hillary.

(Try this on as a barf alert: John McCain as Hillary’s running mate. Denied the GOP nomination, he’ll bolt his party and team with Hil who’s got the Dem nomination sewed up. Yep, that’s the latest hot DC buzz.)

Now it’s time for the other shoe to drop. Triggering the shoe-dropping for me was Michael Ledeen this week in Ledeen’s Lair with Targeting Tehran and Damascus. He compares and contrasts Ronald Reagan’s support for democratic revolution within the Soviet Empire and George Bush’s support for democratic revolution within the Terrorist Empire (my term) composed of Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

The anti-Soviet strategy of Ronald Reagan was dubbed by the press as “The Reagan Doctrine,” which as you may know I had something to do with. The most critical component of the Reagan Doctrine was it’s being a full-court press: supporting all anti-Soviet movements, from armed guerrillas in Nicaragua to labor union protests in Poland to nascent democracy movements in Ukraine, as a structural assault on the Soviet Empire as a whole.

This was Reagan’s vision, and everywhere and always the State Department stood in the way of implementing it. George Schultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State for the duration of the Reagan Doctrine (1982-1989), had to be dragged kicking and screaming by Reagan to get out of the way – even to the point of literally standing in Reagan’s way trying to block him from leaving a Cabinet meeting.

Schultz was insistent that Reagan not deliver a “provocative” speech in Berlin, angrily claiming it will “ruin everything” if Reagan said something so outrageous as demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall. Reagan finally had to gently but firmly push Schultz physically out of the doorway.

George Bush will never have to do that with Condi Rice. But while she will never get in George Bush’s way herself, she has been unable to get the State Department out of the way of implementing a Bush Doctrine for fighting Jihadism. That’s why there is no “Bush Doctrine,” no strategic vision for dismantling the Terrorist Empire.

A perfect example is a conversation I had with a State Department bureaucrat who at the time (June 2004) was a key staffer of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. When I told him the only way to have peace in Iraq was for us to effect regime change in Iran, he recoiled. “One step at a time, Jack,” he counseled.

“If we took it one step at a time with the Soviets,” I responded, “the Soviet Union and its Empire would still be fully intact.”

Armitage quit State along with his buddy and boss Colin Powell in November 2004. (Lately, he’s been fingered as the most likely leaker of Valerie Plame as a pseudo-covert CIA agent back in 2003, starting the whole “Plamegate” farce.) But that staffer is still there, along with hordes of other career bureaucrats who are all allergic to effecting regime change in any government no matter how lethal to America’s security.

Thus Bush’s call for democratic revolution in Moslem Middle East tyrannies is blocked and stymied by State, except in Iraq where Bush and Rumsfeld were able to effect a straight military solution.

This, as Michael Ledeen points out, is too narrow and tightly focused as a solution to succeed. Even if we do secure Iraq, the War on Jihadism will continue due to Jihadism’s support by Syria and Iran.

Defeating Jihadism requires new, peaceful, democratic governments in Damascus and Tehran. This cannot be done militarily with the Marines and the 3^rd ID. It can only be done by fomenting Uncontrollable Urban Unrest (the Triple U) and precipitating a democratic revolution.

Condi understands this. Yet she has so far proven incapable of getting her department to support and help implement it. Thus the question: If she can’t control her State Department, how is she going to control the White House?

We saw in 44 that she wants to be president and so does George Bush. But no presidential nomination is a coronation. She is going to have to fight for it, and provide evidence she can handle the job. The best way, a necessary way, is for her to bring her own State Department on board in implementing a Bush Doctrine for dismantling the Terrorist Empire.

If she can’t do this, support for her presidential ambitions is going to rapidly cool. If she can, then, to use an accurate however inappropriate metaphor, she’s In Like Flynn.

So, all you Condi fans out there, get the message to her: Set the policy of the State Department to be regime change in Damascus and Tehran. She’ll never be president unless she does, and we’ll have President Hillary instead.