11/21/12 – Michael Hirsh – The Scott Horton Show

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And our next guest on the show today is Michael Hirsch.
Now from the National Journal.
He used to be with Newsweek.
And his recent piece here at NationalJournal.com is called Susan Rice.
Benghazi may be least of her problems.
Welcome back to the show, Michael.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
It's been so long I can barely say welcome back and be credible.
But good to talk to you again.
Great journalism as always.
Thank you.
Now, so first of all, when it comes to the controversy over Susan Rice and her very likely nomination to move from U.N. Ambassador to Secretary of State, it seems like her only real hang-up or problem within the councils of power is about the Benghazi controversy.
Other than that, she's got a clean slate in a very bipartisan interventionist foreign policy kind of way.
Is that your reading as well?
No, no, not at all.
I mean, in fact, as I indicated in that piece you cited, I don't think.
Oh, no, I didn't mean the truth.
I meant as far as what's the controversy in D.C.
Yes, that is the perception right now.
Although there have been some dissenting voices, Dana Milbank, columnist with the Washington Post, came out saying she was not fit for the job because of her personality, which she's seen as arrogant and in some ways out of touch.
But for the most part, the perception up until now has been that her now infamous appearance on the Sunday talk shows on September 16th, when she somewhat misleadingly indicated that the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11th were the result of spontaneous protests linked to this anti-Muslim film, that seems to have gotten her in deep water.
But I think that story is starting to go away now.
Yes.
Well, and then the problem with that, though, is that there really is no debate over the kind of thing that you wrote about in your piece here, which is the actual substance of the policies that she advocates.
She doesn't advocate them lightly at all.
She's a very determined interventionist in a great many ways.
Well, that's right.
And what I tried to trace there in that article was a history of naivete going back to the 1990s in her dealings with various African dictators, in the aftermath of what even Bill Clinton said was the single biggest mistake of his presidency.
And, of course, that's saying something, considering the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which he said was his failure to intervene as the Rwandan genocide was going on in 1994.
And Susan Rice was very much part of that.
She was the director on his National Security Council in charge of Africa.
And she herself said that she always felt terrible about that.
But what's interesting and what has not come to light very much is what she did afterwards when she became Assistant Secretary of State for Africa in Clinton's second term.
And she dealt with many of these same dictators and kind of looked the other way when people like Paul Kagame, the leader of Rwanda, began intervening in Congo and sort of a counter-genocide began there.
Well, now, in Congo, what year did Mobutu fall out of power?
Did he die or was he overthrown?
I forget.
Well, that was right about then, in the mid-to-late 1990s.
And what happened was, in the post-Mobutu era, Paul Kagame and a few other leaders, Museveni in Uganda, were kind of set up as this new generation of African leaders, again, somewhat naively by the Clinton administration, with Susan Rice at the fore of this policy.
And there was a sense that we could simply leave Africa to these new generation of leaders when, in fact, what was happening was that they were, in many ways, just following the practices of their predecessors while putting on a benign face for the West.
Kagame was a great example of someone who posed as a kind of peacemaker, even while he was intervening heavily in eastern Congo, where a lot of atrocities were occurring.
And this is an issue that goes right up until the present day, because a UN report has just come out linking Rwanda, the Rwandan government under Kagame, to a very brutal group called the M23, a group of rebels that has been committing atrocities in the Congo.
And Susan Rice at the UN has not been a very forthright opponent of these Rwandan policies.
Well, see, that's the real trick, right?
She says, or even the policy, or the way you put it, kind of leave it to the new generation of leaders.
They're not just leaving it, though.
If there's a new generation of leaders, they're picking and choosing and backing.
The ones that they'll tolerate are the ones that they subsidize, and they make America complicit.
So it's not just a war in Congo, it's somewhat America's war in Congo, right?
Yeah, and this is, you know, look, the conflict in the Congo, which has been going on for most of the decade, and almost no one pays any attention to, I mean, is known as the Forgotten War, is really a terrible, terrible conflict.
More than 5 million people have died.
It's sometimes called Africa's World War because there are so many parties involved.
And this is the real Susan Rice record that I think needs to be examined, and I think will be examined if, indeed, Obama decides to name her his Secretary of State.
As I said, I think this Benghazi story, which is really entirely about what she said on one series of talk shows on one day, and was not really about the policy she pursued herself, I think that's going to begin to fade away.
We're even seeing that now.
John McCain, I think, just today issued a statement suggesting that, you know, he no longer believes the administration changed these talking points, but Susan Rice was given by the intelligence community.
So I do think as time goes on, and if Obama goes ahead and appoints her, you're going to see her real record start to be debated far more than the story that's been grabbing the headlines.
Well, I'm less confident of that.
I'm pretty much just counting on this interview with you to get it out there, Michael.
Tell me this.
Someone who, I mean, because, look, I could totally understand the point of view that, you know, here you are, you're a junior staffer on the Clinton National Security Council.
This horrible genocide goes on.
You could have spoken up, and you don't, and now you want to relive that and go save those poor people.
Okay, okay.
That makes sense to me.
I understand.
I would accept that she's got honest motivations for all that kind of deal.
But then, so how does that lead to support and even devotion for somebody like Melissinawe, the late dictator of Ethiopia, when that guy's a genocidal maniac?
Right.
Well, you know, it's really difficult to say, and I don't want to sort of get into pop psychology, but Susan Rice is not that different from many specialists in Africa who have a kind of jaded sense that, you know, we have to accept African big men who are slightly less awful, slightly less horrible than the previous generation, you know, the Mobutus.
And, again, who speak the right language.
They talk about markets.
They talk about opening up their economies, even while they pursue some of these same policies.
And, you know, the Ethiopian leader you just cited was one of them.
I mean, on the day of his death in September, Susan Rice tweeted sort of a mini-eulogy that really caught a lot of human rights activists off guard because it was so glowing.
She later went there to deliver a eulogy for him that was equally glowing.
And it does raise questions about whether she, somewhat naively, has allowed herself to get in bed with these dictators, thinking that they'll keep the peace, while turning a blind eye and, indeed, forcing the UN Security Council to turn a blind eye because she has actively blocked a couple of reports that were going to make the association between the Rwandan government and these atrocity-committing Congolese rebels.
You know, and that's a serious issue, and I don't know why.
I think she's not that different from a lot of other people who simply want to wash their hands of these African conflicts, and particularly the Congolese war that no one is paying attention to.
But I do think, as I say, this has to be in the forefront of any really tough look at Susan Rice's record.
Well, you know, it's funny.
Most times, I mean, I don't know about the whole history of 20th century American foreign policy or whatever, but usually they don't wrap it all up in such moralistic tones like this.
I mean, usually the story is, hey, you know, why does Dick Cheney back Zinawi?
Well, Cheney backs Zinawi because Zinawi kills Somalis for Cheney.
And nobody pretends that it's because Dick Cheney has such a bleeding heart for the poor whoever that he wants Zinawi to go and save.
It is what it is.
Everybody knows that.
He's a loyal, was a loyal puppet of the Americans and accomplished our agenda.
But then so the part to me that really gets me, I don't know if my funny bone, my irony bone or something, is, you know, Susan Rice is one of these ladies who really dresses up her entire foreign policy as humanitarian intervention and caring about the weakest, poorest people the most first, is the whole point, and then turns around and has a Dick Cheney foreign policy and just calls it whatever she wants, you know, calls it a baby blue flag instead of red, white and blue.
I think there's a lot to that, frankly.
It's not that different.
I mean, she's obviously not going off starting wars the way Cheney did.
But in terms of this rather stark and, you know, dispassionate sort of real politic, let's just, you know, deal with it whatever dictators we can.
I think there's a similarity there.
Well, and then she did help start the war in Libya, right?
Yeah, well, right.
I mean, that was her great moment of humanitarian intervention.
But it does contrast with what she's done in Africa.
Yeah.
I wonder if anyone at her confirmation hearing will ask about her accusation that Gaddafi was passing out Viagra and all the soldiers were committing mass rapes and they were going to rape everybody in Benghazi and all these lies that she told that were obvious lies.
I don't think this is likely to come up.
I remember listening to a right wing talk radio show host saying, you know, like a Limbaugh clone type of guy saying, well, even Susan Rice, who's the exact opposite of me, says that this is true.
So we know that it's true.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Just a fun little anecdote about how we got into that war based on really silly lies, right?
Yeah.
Mass Viagra armies of rapists.
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I guess a lot of important people read the National Journal.
I hope they'll pick up on this, because if it just comes down to a personality conflict between the president and John McCain, who he beat two elections ago over, you know, whether she did something so horrible on Benghazi or not, then and I think pretty much all sides would like to limit the debate to that if they could.
And people aren't really going to hear very much of this.
You know.
Yeah.
Well, let's let's try to get the story out.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
I really appreciate your time on the show as always.
Bye.
All right.
But that's Michael Hirsch.
Now at the National Journal.
National Journal dot com.
I think it's been a while, actually.
Susan Rice.
Benghazi may be the least of her problems.
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