No, we're not talking about all the race-related buzz around the Republican National Convention, like Romney's infamous zero percent of the black vote. Or Baratunde's "Negro Count." Or "peanut-gate." And Condoleezza Rice's status as a black female Republican in a predominantly white male party is old news.
What's actually unsettling about her speaking role at the convention, according to Foreign Policy magazine, is that she "may be the Bush official most at odds with where Romney and the Republican Party currently stand on some of the most pressing foreign-policy issues of the day." Uri Freedman offers five examples of her very different point of view, previewed here:
NORTH KOREA
Rice may have included North Korea in her list of "outposts of tyranny" in 2005, but she also spearheaded six-party nuclear weapons talks with Pyongyang and met with the country's foreign minister in 2008, striking a deal in which the United States removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and green-lighted fuel and food supplies in exchange for North Korea pledging to dismantle a nuclear facility and disclose details about its nuclear program …
ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT
Rice, who organized the 2007 Annapolis conference that enshrined the two-state solution as the roadmap for Middle East peace, helped negotiate the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and criticized Israeli plans to expand settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 2008 …
IRAQ
Rice was a prominent voice as the Bush administration made its case for war with Iraq in 2003. In January of that year, for example, Rice penned an op-ed in the New York Times to explain why Iraq was "lying" in disclosing details about its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs to the United Nations. "Iraq is proving not that it is a nation bent on disarmament, but that it is a nation with something to hide," she noted. "It should know that time is running out" …
Read more at Foreign Policy.