Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER SEVEN: Baghdad as Birmingham

213 chapter seven Baghdad as Birmingham Nobody can go back and reinvent the past. —condoleezza rice, on CBS 60 Minutes What I would expect from Rice, however, is a better understanding of the history of the civil rights movement and the lessons it taught, or should have taught, the nation and the world. —eugene robinson, “Baghdad Isn’t Birmingham” Not even Bear Bryant, perhaps because he walked on water, could boast of a million-barrel crude tanker with his name on it. But from the mid-1990s until early 2001, the double-hulled Condoleezza Rice floated on a rising tide that lifted some boats far more than others. Its youthful namesake, fresh from service on George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council, joined the Chevron board of directors in 1991, armed with her knowledge of the former Soviet republics and the oil-rich Caspian region. Republican, African American, female, and native of civil rights crucible Birmingham, Rice was the public face of Chevron’s public policy committee. As for the Condoleezza Rice, she was a frequent visitor to West Africa, hauling crude out of this region of multi-billion-dollar Chevron investment and making stops, according to reporting by Ken Silverstein, in “Nigeria’s Niger Delta, where continual oil spills have left the groundwater poisoned (and where a Chevron-hired ‘kill-and-go’ security squad gunned down two protesters in 1998); in Angola, where Western oil money, often in the form of signing bonuses to the government, continues to finance a 25-year-long civil war; and in the Democratic Republic of Congo . . . embroiled in its own brutal war.”1 Highly paid for her corporate service, Condoleezza Rice unambiguously 214 • chapter seven tied the global interests of U.S.-based oil companies with the national interest: “I’m very proud of my association with Chevron,” she told Fox tv in 2000, “and I think we should be very proud of the job that American oil companies are doing in exploration abroad, in exploration at home, and in making certain that we have a safe energy supply.”2 Rice’s ascendance from Titusville, Alabama, to University of Denver grad, to Stanford faculty member, to government service in D.C., to Stanford provost had been rapid, and she was not widely known. When Rice’s ship sailed big-time as George W. Bush’s national security advisor in January 2001, Chevron, seeking to downplay its connection to an administration known for its inseparability from Big Oil, renamed the Condoleezza Rice the Altair Voyager. “In the old sailing ship days,” warns Pat Moloney, maritime historian, “they’d say it was bad luck to change the name of a ship.”3 If she ever heard this superstition, Condoleezza would have poohpoohed it. She made her own luck. In 2004 and 2005 Forbes magazine ranked Rice as the most powerful woman in the world. The first African American woman secretary of state followed Colin Powell, the first African American. Both had ties to Birmingham’s black middle class. Condoleezza, born in 1954, was the only child of a Presbyterian minister and a teacher; Colin Powell’s wife, Alma Johnson, not quite a generation older than Rice, was the daughter and niece of principals of all-black Birmingham high schools.4 For Republicans in the new century, Condoleezza and Colin became highly visible figures in an effort to erode a solid Democratic bloc. How advantageous for the lapsed party of Lincoln was a black woman whose childhood had crossed paths with the most horrific event of the 1960s civil rights movement—even though her family rejected the street protest tactics that directly challenged desegregation in her home city. As the Bush presidency entered its lame duck phase, few African Americans had switched allegiance, and there were no black Republican members of Congress.5 Republicans might quote Lincoln more often in speeches, but the Democratic Party remained the home of African American voters. Long committed to progressive politics, they were outraged over Bush domestic policy and embarrassed and angry that Rice and Powell had pitched so hard and deceptively for Bush’s Iraq invasion. “If it’s nice to see a black face in high places,” wrote Patricia Williams, “that pleasure is more than outweighed by Rice’s deployment as spokeswoman for an unprecedented policy of preemptive war.”6 Far from the high places, the percentage of black army recruits dropped Baghdad as Birmingham...