Condoleezza Rice By Michelle Goldberg

Were she not complicit in so much destruction, one would almost feel bad for Condoleezza Rice. Raised in a proud, educated Southern black family that instilled in her the need to be twice as good as everybody else, Rice has been devoted, above all else, to personal achievement. Her father opposed the collective activism of Martin Luther King, believing in self-advancement through individual excellence; like him, she seems to have been determined to transcend discrimination through sheer determination. In the conclusion to her recent biography of Rice, Elisabeth Bumiller wrote: "It was obvious from Rices many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, although she displayed elements of all of them. Her real ideology was succeeding." Yet her legacy is one of almost unrelieved failure.

The faults of many of Bush's accomplices - including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby - lay in the rigidity of their world views, which were cultishly impermeable to contradictory evidence. Rice's fatal flaw is almost the opposite - she seems to have few core political beliefs at all, save her libertarian faith in personal striving. She advanced as the protege of a succession of powerful men, among them Josef Korbel, the Czechoslovakian emigre professor (and father of Madeleine Albright); Brent Scowcroft, the arch-realist national security adviser to the first president Bush; and, of course, George Bush. These men had quite different political orientations, but she adopted them all, mirroring the views of her mentors in ways they all found captivating.

So for all her learning and expertise, there was no way this ambitious cipher could guide Bush, or push against his passionately committed ideologues. Instead, she flattered and followed. As Bumiller wrote, one reason Bush was so taken with Rice was "she never made him feel inadequate or ignorant."

Her eight years in the administration - four as national security adviser, four as secretary of state - are a record of devastating lack of leadership and initiative. Before September 11, she was unresponsive to counter terrorism tsar Richard Clark's urgent warnings about al-Qaida, and downgraded his position. Casting off her realism, she joined Bush in his reckless rush into Iraq. David Kay, the former US weapons inspector in Iraq, has put much of the blame for the wars faulty justification on Rice's shoulders. As secretary of state, she pushed Bush's ad hoc agenda of democracy promotion by pressing for the Palestinian elections that brought Hamas to power. Then, seemingly unprepared for the result, she showed the shallowness of America's commitment to democratic legitimacy by arranging the political boycott of the new government. She deserves no small slice of blame for the current carnage in Gaza.

Yet for all her culpability, there's an element of pathos to her story as well. Had she attached herself to a better person than Bush, her knowledge, drive and poise might have been put to good use. She might have bettered the world along with herself.

? Michelle Goldberg is a former contributing writer at Salon.com and the author of Kingdom Coming: the Rise of Christian Nationalism