Over the past week a curious
“groundswell” has taken place in the American media.
Former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice, someone
who has never run for political office and is largely
unknown to the American public, has been promoted in a
series of press reports as a likely choice of presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to be his
running mate.
The Washington Post led off the barrage with its
July 25 profile, headlined, “Susan Rice’s advantage: A long
work history with Biden. Former Obama official has emerged
as an underdog VP pick.” The article noted that for four
years, 2013–2016, Biden frequently began his work day with a
national security briefing from Rice, given jointly to the
president and vice president in the Oval Office. The two had
offices in the same part of the West Wing, and Biden would
drop in to Rice’s office at will.
With
the proper class pedigree, and like other "foreign
policy advisors" in the bipartisan establishment, Neocon
Susan Rice is a vile, unapologetic criminal on steroids.
A Bolton/Brennan creature in pantsuits.
Two days later, Ryan Lizza in the
Hill wrote: “The
elusive hunt for Biden’s Biden has recently pushed Susan
Rice into the top tier of candidates. As Obama’s national
security adviser for his entire second term, Rice and Biden
worked closely together on an almost daily basis, making her
the only potential running mate who Biden knows so
intimately… very few of the other candidates come close to
meeting that test…”
Lizza went on to quote an unnamed Democratic strategist who
described Biden as focused on foreign policy issues,
particularly conflicts with rival great powers, for which he
would need assistance. To the question who would fill the
bill, the strategist answered, “Susan Rice: ready on Day One
for Russia and China.”
The same day, the New York Times ran a flattering
profile under the headline, “Susan Rice Wants to Run for
Office. Will Her First Campaign Be for VP?” The article
noted Rice’s interest in a Senate race in Maine, where she
has family ties, although she ultimately decided not to
challenge incumbent Republican Susan Collins. The Times
wrote that Rice has been demonized by right-wing Republicans
for statements she made on television about the attack on a
US facility in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, in which the US
ambassador and three others were killed.
More categorical was the headline in Politico for
an article posted on the evening of July 27: “‘It’s
absolutely serious:’ Susan Rice vaults to the top of the VP
heap.” This account centered on Rice’s relationship with
Biden during the Obama administration, concluding that
“allies of others being eyed for the vice presidency are
increasingly worried about Rice, especially because of her
close ties to Biden, who, as Obama’s No. 2, had an office
just steps away from hers.”
From the Rwanda genocide to drone missile assassinations
Susan Rice, now 55, has spent her entire career in the area
of US foreign policy, beginning as a policy aide to
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988,
when she was 23. She worked for eight years each in the
Clinton and Obama administrations, either in the State
Department or on the National Security Council. When
Republicans were in the White House, she was part of the
Democratic foreign policy apparatus in exile, working for
McKinsey & Co., Intellibridge Inc. and the Brookings
Institution, as well as advising Democratic presidential
candidates John Kerry and Obama.
Rice is the scion of a black bourgeois family in Washington
D.C., where her father Emmett, an economics professor,
became the second African American governor of the Federal
Reserve, a prominent local banker and member of several
corporate boards. Her mother Lois was a longtime executive
with the College Board. She helped establish the Pell Grant
program in the Department of Education and was a board
member or corporate adviser at Firestone, McGraw-Hill,
Control Data Corporation and Fleet Bank. She also was a
trustee of the Center for Naval Analyses and was named by
President Bill Clinton to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory
Board.
Clinton appointed Susan Rice to his National Security
Council in 1993 and she had principal responsibility for
Africa during such disasters as the Rwanda genocide. She was
named assistant secretary of state for African Affairs
during Clinton’s second term (1997–2001), and was criticized
for her close ties to authoritarian rulers such as Paul
Kagame in Rwanda and Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia. She was in
charge of US policy in Africa in 1998, when twin bombings
hit the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and Clinton
ordered a retaliatory missile strike that destroyed a
pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that had no connection to
the attacks.
When Obama won the presidency in November 2008, Rice was a
top foreign policy adviser, with wide support in the
military-intelligence apparatus and big business. She was
named US ambassador to the United Nations and confirmed
unanimously by the Senate.
As the WSWS wrote:
While
often touted as the first African-American woman to
serve as US ambassador to the UN, in reality Rice’s role
was in direct continuity with figures such as John
Bolton and John Negroponte, appointed by the George W.
Bush administration with the aim of bullying other
nations into acquiescing to US demands…
Rice
was among the closest advisers to Obama, dating back to
when he was a US senator, and was one of the first
prominent members of the Democratic Party foreign policy
establishment to join his 2008 presidential campaign.
The affinity between the two gave the lie to Obama’s
pretense then of representing some kind of antiwar
alternative to the Bush administration.
In
the years before Obama’s election, Rice was part of the
Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a right-wing
Democratic think tank that advocated the continued
occupation of Iraq, a military “surge” in Afghanistan
and a more aggressive military posture toward China. She
publicly supported the US war of aggression against Iraq
as well as the “weapons of mass destruction” pretext
provided by Bush.
Within the Obama administration, she became one of the
leading advocates for imperialist intervention in Libya and
Syria, on the pretext of pursuing “humanitarian” and
“democratic” aims. She was a strong supporter of the Zionist
regime in Israel, denouncing as “anti-Israeli crap” any
gestures at the United Nations in support of the
Palestinians.
In September 2012, after the attack on the US facility in
Benghazi, Libya, that left the US ambassador and three other
Americans dead, Rice was sent out on the Sunday television
interview programs to give the official story that a
spontaneous local uprising, not an organized terrorist
attack, was the cause of the disaster. The truth, which the
Obama administration wished to conceal, was that its policy
of relying on Islamic fundamentalist groups to overthrow the
Gaddafi regime in Libya had led to “blowback,” as the Al
Qaeda-linked groups turned their guns on the US mission.
With congressional Republicans seizing on the Benghazi
affair as a weapon against Hillary Clinton, then the US
secretary of state and the expected Democratic presidential
candidate in 2016, Rice took the fall. She withdrew her name
from consideration to replace Clinton and in July 2013 was
named Obama’s national security adviser, a position that did
not require Senate confirmation but gave her considerable
authority in coordinating US foreign policy.
Among the imperialist crimes with which her tenure was
associated were the ongoing military interventions in Syria,
Iraq and Afghanistan; the ultra-right coup in Ukraine that
overthrew the elected pro-Russian government; the escalating
US-backed war by Saudi Arabia in Yemen; mounting US pressure
on China, including the elevation of the South China Sea to
the level of a major international crisis; and the savage
economic squeeze on Iran that produced the 2015 nuclear
agreement.
Particularly significant was the ongoing campaign of drone
missile assassinations, initially in Iraq, Syria and
Afghanistan, then extended to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and
Libya, and eventually including nearly all of North Africa.
White House officials spoke about “terror Tuesdays,” where
Obama, Rice and then-chief counterterrorism aide John
Brennan—later CIA director—would go over death lists and
make their selections.
As the WSWS explained in 2016, the National Security
Council, where Rice held sway, played a central role in the
drone missile murder campaign:
The
role of the NSC in this process is particularly
important. This body has quadrupled in size under the
Bush and Obama administrations, as day-to-day direction
of national security policy has been concentrated in the
White House. Besides giving the president and his
closest aides a direct line to the military-intelligence
apparatus, the NSC insulates the drone assassination
program from outside scrutiny.
Considered
part of the White House, the NSC is exempt from any
congressional scrutiny as well as the provisions of the
Freedom of Information Act, under the interpretation of
“executive privilege” embraced by Bush and Obama and
accepted by Democrats and Republicans in Congress. NSC
officials, up to and including current National Security
Adviser Susan Rice, cannot be subpoenaed by a
congressional committee or otherwise held accountable
for their actions.
What
a Rice selection would mean
While its article boosting a possible Rice selection was
not the first to appear, the New York Times has
led the way in this campaign, setting the agenda, as is
frequently the case, for the corporate media as a whole. On
July 21, the Timesop-ed page published a column by
Rice herself, under the headline, “Take the Next Step Toward
Racial Justice,” in which she postured as an opponent of
police violence and “systemic racism.”
There is little to say about the content of Rice’s column,
filled with vague soporifics about improving education,
dismantling structural barriers and achieving “racial
justice,” all without any fundamental change in the
capitalist system, which of course goes unmentioned as the
root cause of police repression and racist oppression.
This topic is, of course, an awkward one for someone whose
role in government has been John Brennan in a pantsuit. Rice
has never had any public association with struggles for
democratic rights or against police brutality. Quite the
contrary: she was well known as a friend of right-wing
African dictators, so long as they toed the line on US
foreign policy demands.
Her tenure at the NSC began at the time of the coup by
Egyptian military dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, warmly
embraced—after a few perfunctory “human rights” noises—by
the Obama administration.
But Rice has been attempting to show some “progressive”
side in media commentaries over the past few months in an
effort to minimize any criticism from the Sanders wing of
the Democratic Party should she become the vice-presidential
nominee.
She hardly needs to bother. Bernie Sanders has never
displayed a trace of independence from the imperialist
foreign policy of the Obama-Biden administration, or the
Clinton administration before it, bringing out his “antiwar”
posturing only when a Republican was in the White House.
In 2020, after closing up his campaign for the Democratic
presidential nomination and endorsing Biden, Sanders set up
six joint committees staffed by Biden and Sanders supporters
to work out Democratic Party policy in six key areas. None
of them concerned foreign policy—signaling that the incoming
Biden administration will have a free hand to pursue its
right-wing agenda of military build-up against Russia and
China and the forceful assertion of US imperialist interests
around the world.
If Biden chooses Rice as his running mate, it will allow
him to satisfy the gender and racial warriors of the
identity politics wing of the Democratic Party without
making the slightest concession to the working class. On the
contrary, by selecting the Democratic equivalent of Colin
Powell and Condoleezza Rice, an African American advocate
and apologist for American corporate interests up to and
including imperialist war, Biden would be sending a signal
to Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus that
his administration will be absolutely ruthless in its
defense of the global interests of American imperialism.
Patrick
Martin is a senior geopolitical analyst
with
wsws.org, a Trotskyist website. (See our note
below).
![US Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton (R) talks with Susan Rice (L), the US
Ambassador to the United Nations in a Security Council
meeting during the United Nations General Assembly on 23
September 2010 at UN headquarters in New York. [STAN
HONDA/AFP via Getty Images]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/GettyImages-104384539-e1602711369110.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
