Rohan Pearce
It sounds like a heartwarming story: An African-American girl born in Alabama during the era of Jim Crow, growing up and getting a job that makes her almost inevitably be described as "the most powerful woman in the world", power she of course uses to spread democracy and do good. It might make a good docu-drama for those whose taste in television runs to shows like the excruciatingly awful Commander in Chief. But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who will be in Australia in mid-March, is like her fellow members of the Bush administration guilty of pursuing policies to strengthen US imperialism at the expense of human rights and human lives.
Rice, who topped Forbes magazine's "The 100 Most Powerful Women" list in 2005, has a carefully cultivated public image. According to a December 5 New York Times article it's the result of "a deliberate strategy" that has meant she has unquestionably "ascended to rock star status". However, when she visits Australia, anti-war campaigners won't be giving her a rock-star welcome.
It's widely believed that the key issue to be addressed by the secretary of state on her visit is extending the participation of Australian troops in the occupation of Iraq after the return home in May of the Japanese engineers whom they have been guarding.
That Rice should find herself jet setting around the globe to build support for the brutal and illegal occupation of Iraq is no surprise. A key motivation for the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq was to seize control of the country's oil reserves, a potential profits bonanza for US corporations, and the "blood for oil" equation is a familiar one for Rice. From 1991 until she took up the position of Bush's national security adviser in January 2001, Rice served on the board of oil giant Chevron and was on its public policy committee.
Chevron was so thrilled by Rice's service (and, no doubt, the fact that one of their own would have the ear of the US president) that they named an oil tanker after her. (The 129,000-tonne tanker Condoleezza Rice was renamed in April 2001 because it drew too much scrutiny to the ties between oil corporations and the White House.)
During Rice's time there, Chevron had a grim record of wanton environmental devastation and human rights violations, particularly in Nigeria. A 2005 list of "most wanted" corporate violators of human rights compiled by San Francisco-based NGO Global Exchange stated: "In Nigeria, Chevron has collaborated with the Nigerian police and military who have opened fire on peaceful protesters who oppose oil extraction in the Niger Delta. In 1998, two indigenous Ilaje activists were killed by Nigerian military officers flown in by the company while protesting at an oil platform in Ondo state. In 1999, two people from Opia village were killed by military personnel paid by Chevron, after soliciting a meeting to complain about the company's harmful effects on local fishing."
But it's since Bush took up digs in the White House that Chevron Rice has been complicit in human rights abuses on an even larger scale. In Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty — a 2004 book on the experiences of Paul O'Neill, US treasury secretary until December 2002 — he reports on the details of the first meeting of Bush's National Security Council, on January 30, 2000. The topic of the meeting was US policy in the Middle East. According to Suskind, Rice "noted that Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region". "Getting Hussein was now the administration's focus, that much was already clear", O'Neill told Suskind.
Rice played an important role in Washington's propaganda campaign in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, helping spread accusations that Iraq possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein's regime had ties to Osama bin Ladin's al Qaeda terrorist network.
During a CNN interview on September 8, 2002, she claimed: "We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance — into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to — high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors found no evidence linking the aluminium tubes to a nuclear weapons program.
After Baghdad had fallen, Rice even went as far as to assert that the US had found evidence of Iraqi WMD. In May 28, 2003, she told journalists: "We have found, in Iraq, biological weapons laboratories that look precisely like what secretary Powell described in his February 5th report to the United Nations. We are in the process of interviewing scientists and uncovering documents. This was a country, Iraq, that went to great lengths to conceal and deceive on what it was doing in terms of weapons of mass destruction." No biological weapons laboratories had been found.
Nor has Rice's role in the devastation of Iraq been confined to White House misinformation campaigns. In the May 24, 2004, edition of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh revealed that "several past and present American intelligence officials" had told the investigative journalist details of a secret Pentagon operation, codenamed Copper Green, that had received "across-the-board approval from [US defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice". The operation "encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq" and, Hersh wrote, was the "roots of the Abu Ghraib" torture scandal.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, March 15, 2006.
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