Word: rice
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Rice is not accustomed to failure. The prodigious accomplishments of her youth--she learned Beethoven at 5, finished college at 19 and earned tenure at Stanford at 26--have been followed by a glide to global prominence. Even as the Bush Administration's support has slid to historic depths, Rice's image has been relatively unsullied. She remains not just the most glamorous member of the Bush Cabinet but also its most popular, with job-approval ratings 20 points higher than her boss's. Among the top officials in the Administration, she is the only one who could reasonably expect...
...none of that is of much use now. With the U.S. military tied down on two fronts and the rest of the world growing resistant to American power, the challenges for Rice are as daunting as they have been for any Secretary of State in the past three decades. After six years of tussling with others on Bush's national-security team, Rice has seen off her rivals and emerged as the principal spokesperson for Bush's foreign policy. Her reward has been to inherit responsibility for selling a failed policy in Iraq and salvaging a legacy for Bush...
...Rice also faces fierce challenges at home. In Congress, members of her own party have turned against the Iraq war and are finding it safe to criticize Rice and Bush for their handling of it. A Senate vote is likely next week on a bipartisan bill opposing Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. Congressional Democrats have promised flurries of hearings on the war and the diplomacy surrounding it, which means Rice can expect to spend a lot more time answering her skeptics on the Hill...
This is not the messy state of affairs that Rice--the meticulously well-mannered, history-obsessed perfectionist--hoped to find herself in. If she has been more inclined than her peers to acknowledge the Administration's missteps, particularly in Iraq, she has yet to show she has the ability or will to correct them. Her accomplishments as Secretary of State have been modest, and even those have begun to fade. She pushed Bush to appoint the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, only to see him ignore the commission's call to pull back from the fight in Iraq; instead Bush plans...
...growing tension with Tehran illustrates the quandaries facing Rice. As America's top diplomat, she is judged by whether the U.S. can advance its interests without resorting to military force. But Rice hasn't distanced herself from the hawks in the White House, in part because Bush continues to identify with them. She has barely begun to address the damage to U.S. credibility wrought by Iraq or articulate a diplomatic strategy that might shore up U.S. influence and coax others to help contain Iraq's violence within its borders...