Subject: Rice blind to Bush’s faults, says book: (I read somewhere that Rice and the President even work out together.) US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not raise questions when the administration marched towards war in Iraq during the first term of President George W Bush because of her loyalty to the President, a new book says. “Rice tended to enable the President’s missteps rather than check them. … (S)he molded his instincts, she didn’t challenge them. So as the administration marched toward war in Iraq, she didn’t push back,” says Newsweek’s Marcus Mabry in a yet to be released biography of Rice, the National Security Advisor during the US military operation in Iraq. Even Rice’s friends, most of whom happen to be Democrats, say her affection for Bush blinded her to his failings. “She thought he could do no wrong,” said one. “She didn’t question troop levels or the Defense Department’s rosy post-Saddam scenarios. She didn’t demand the administration devise a single, unified plan after Saddam’s statue fell,” says Mabry. Excerpts from the book have been published in the latest issue of Newsweek. While Secretary of State Rice admits the administration made mistakes, she says they had nothing to do with “dysfunction” in the inter-agency process she ran. …The author quotes some administration officials as saying Rice as national security advisor concentrated too heavily on advising the President, rather than managing the national security “process”. “They point to her remark at a Washington dinner party in 2004, when Rice inadvertently said, ‘As I was telling my husb...’, before abruptly correcting herself, ‘As I was telling President Bush’.” … Rice had told her friend that she does not want the job in Bush’s second term. But three days later, she accepted when the President offered the job of Secretary of State to replace Colin Powell. “Of course, her friends and her stepmother Clara Rice offered a simpler explanation for why she stayed: ‘she just can’t say no to that man’.” … “In a political sense, I think he kind of courted her. He really went after her. He’s very charming,” said one of her friends. And Rice was drawn to Bush. “First of all, I thought he was wonderful to be around,” she recalled in an interview with the author. “He was warm and funny and easy to be around. I thought he had just an incredibly inquisitive mind ... You could barely finish an explanation before he was digging into it,” Rice says. Rice’s friends, Mabry says, insisted the attraction to Bush was platonic, but Brenda Hamberry-Green, her hairdresser, who had spent years commiserating with Rice over how hard it was for successful black women to find a good man, noticed a change when Rice started working for Bush. “He fills that need,” Hamberry-Green decided. “Bush is her feed.”