Hell Hath No Fury by Rosalind Miles

halfhearted attempt at shuttle diplomacy in the summer of 2006, in the wake of Israel’s abortive attempt to destroy the power of the extremist Islamic organization Hezbollah (Party of God) in Lebanon, produced little or nothing, which was unsurprising considering that President Bush gave Israel the green light for the offensive. Rice, it seems, did not caution against the possibility of Israeli failure, largely because she was party to the decision to lend full war supplies and intelligence support to an Israeli effort to smash Hezbollah in the “war on terror.”
    In turn this stoked the uneasiness expressed by the United States’ NATO allies over US policy on the “special rendition” of terrorist suspects to countries where, in all probability, torture might be used to extract information. Rice had long stonewalled on this issue, but her public declaration, in December 2005, of the United States’ adherence to the UN convention against torture helped to clear the way for the White House’s subsequent reluctant embrace of legislation banning cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. In September 2006, however, Bush’s frank admission of the reality of rendition coupled with the denial that the process involved torture—to which the president ascribed a very narrow definition—left Rice further exposed and embarrassed such allies as the British prime minister Tony Blair, who had denied the existence of rendition.
    Perhaps the greatest constraint on Rice was her intense loyalty to President Bush—in a Freudian slip she once started to refer to him as “my husband,” before biting her tongue—and her reluctance to push him out of the comfort zone created by his circle of cronies. Her attempts to define a “transformational diplomacy” for the Bush years had foundered by the autumn of 2006, as the situation in Iraq grew steadily worse, and Rice took to comparing the war on terror to the American Civil War, declaring, “I am sure that there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold.” Meanwhile, President Bush continued to promise “complete victory.”
    In the latter part of 2005 there was growing talk of drafting Rice as the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, possibly to run against Hillary Clinton. Rice ignored the groundswell, and it remained to be seen whether, if nominated, she could successfully reach out to a black constituency that casts a mere 10 percent of its votes for the Republican Party. However, she once tellingly remarked, “My parents had me absolutely convinced that, well, you may not be able to have a hamburger at Woolworth’s, but you can be president of the United States.” However, by the summer of 2007, the train wreck of the Bush presidency had dented her dream.
    Reference: Condoleezza Rice and Philip Zelikov,
Germany Unified and Europe Transformed,
1995; and Antonia Felix,
Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story,
2005.
    SFORZA, CATERINA
    Countess of Forlì, b. 1462, d. 1509
    In one papal bull, Caterina Sforza was castigated as “the daughter of iniquity” and in another, equally bluntly, she was labeled “the daughter of perdition.” War and strife were her natural element. In her early twenties she threw herself into soldiering, and when in command she maintained an iron discipline with the aid of blood-chilling punishments.
    Born the illegitimate daughter of Galeazza Maria Sforza, later Duke of Milan, she was married in 1477 to Girolamo Riario, the nephew of Pope Sixtus IV. Well educated by the standards of the day, she was also athletic and a passionate huntress. She was a handsome woman, but her beauty regime left little to chance. Lotions of nettle seed, cinnabar, ivy leaves, saffron, and sulfur kept her golden locks in perfect condition. Her shining teeth received daily applications of charcoaled