Condoleezza Amnesia

"Wait a darned minute! I've never met either of you guys in my life."

When you’re a big shot like Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, you can’t be expected to remember every piece of paper that crosses your desk, let alone who might have sat on the other side of it. But a pattern of forgetfulness has emerged in the six years that Rice has been national security advisor and then diplomat in chief that suggests a pathological condition.

For want of a more scientific term, let’s call it Condoleezza Amnesia, or CA for short.

The most pungent example of CA has been the July 2001 meeting in her White House office that she doesn’t recall having with CIA Director George Tenet and J. Cofer Black, the State Department’s counterterrorism guru.

Tenet and Black bore bad tidings: Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda posed a grave threat to the homeland. A few weeks later they were proven all too correct.

Condi cannot remember this incredibly important sitdown, although she has acknowledged that as a Sinologist she was still fighting the Cold War when those jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

But now another example of CA, in this case a nasty subspecies called Selective Condoleezza Amnesia (SCA), has come to the fore.

This concerns an overture made by Iran to the U.S. after it responded to the 9/11 attacks by invading the wrong country.

As TPM Muckraker tells the story, the overture came in the form of a fax from the Iranian government to the State Department that proposed a broad dialogue between Teheran and Washington, including cooperation on Iran’s nascent nuculur . . . er, nuclear program and termination of support for Palestinian militant groups. Oh, yeah, the fax also said that Iran would recognize Israel.

Now the Iranians are notorious blowhards, but you'd think that the fax would have gotten the attention of the big cheeses, including Condi when she was still shuffling papers at the White House before she began shuffling papers at State in January 2005.

Well, it almost certainly did because as a high-ranking Bush administration official with a track record for saying and doing dumb things when not being forgetful, she would have been in on the White House’s response.

This was to complain to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax on behalf of the Iranian government that he was wasting their time. Besides which, the administration thought that government, which was not yet led by a bully by the name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was about to collapse anyhow. (Pretty rich, eh?)

A missed opportunity to be sure, and one that caught the notice of Chris Dodd, the senator from Connecticut who is not a self-identified “independent Democrat.” Dodd asked Condi about the fax at a hearing this week.

She responded that:

"I don't remember reading" such a fax. "I can't say categorically" that it didn't happen, she said, adding that she thought she would remember hearing about an overture so dramatic as Iranian recognition of Israel.

Uh oh! Condi’s SCA had kicked in with a vengeance. It turns out that in a National Public Radio interview last year, her memory about the fax was less impaired:

"What the Iranians wanted . . . was to be one-on-one with the United States so that this could be about the United States and Iran," she explained to an interviewer.

Ah ha! Anyhow, Condi told Dodd that she’ll try to dig up a document that might have ushered in a new era of U.S.-Iran relations.

If it exists.

So little time, so much to forget.