Condolezza Rice Portrait Unveiled

An oil painting portrait of Condolezza Rice was sort of unveiled at the U.S. State Department on June 18, 2014. Actually it was rather a non-event for the media. Of the meager handful of news outlets that bothered to report the story, most did not even bother to show the large oil on canvas, let alone trouble themselves by mentioning Steven Polson, the artist who created the painting. But even Polson’s own online portfolio at the time of the unveiling did not have a reproduction of the artist’s rendition – can I use that word? – of the former Secretary of State under George W. Bush.

Politico covered the event, the first line from their report read; “One word – ‘Iraq’ – was never mentioned at the unveiling.” One word was never mentioned in the Politico report – ‘artist.” Nor was the name Steven Polson brought up. The same could be said of the accounts offered by Raw Story, CBS News, The Washington Post, and ABC News. Those stories focused on the remarks of Ms. Rice and the current U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, before a bipartisan crowd.

The U.S. State Department put aside $52,450 in taxpayer dollars for the Rice commission, just before Obama’s fiscal 2014 omnibus spending bill was implemented. That bill forbids, for a one year period, the tradition of spending money on oil portraits of former government officials. A group of U.S. senators are also sponsoring bipartisan legislation that will cap spending on such portraits in the future, limiting the top price tag of a painting to $20,000. Congress has yet to impose caps on skyrocketing CEO compensation, now well over 300 times the pay of the average worker in America. This puts a new spin on “Celebrating the Past, Creating the Future,” the State Department’s description of their illustrious art collection. For 150 years the Department has commissioned or collected an uninterrupted series of oil portraits depicting each Secretary of State, from Thomas Jefferson (the 1st Secretary, 1790-1793) to Colin L. Powell (2001-2005).

According to the Washington Post, the job of painting the Rice portrait was contracted to Portraits, Inc. Claiming to be “the world’s oldest and largest portrait company” with a roster of 150 professional portrait painters, Portraits, Inc. acts as a broker that matches clients with artists. Perhaps because Steven Polson had already created large portraits of former Secretaries Madeleine Albright and Colin Powell (both in the State Department collection), he was given the commission to paint Ms. Rice.

Polson depicted a slightly larger than life-size Rice in a respectable red Republican dress. She gazes directly at the viewer with a genial smile, a single strand of pearls around her neck. It is a flattering but perfunctory portrait, done in a conservative and restrained style.

At the time of the unveiling the Polson website listed the Rice commission as a work in progress, along with upcoming portraits of other luminaries like Michael Hayden (former Director of the CIA under Bush and former head of the National Security Agency under Bush and Obama), and Christopher Cox (former Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security under Bush). Polson’s long list of finished portraits includes other upright citizens like President Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Combined with Polson’s portraits of bipartisan leading lights from government and the so-called private sector, his portfolio is a veritable “whose who” of today’s U.S. ruling class.

Recall that Condolezza Rice played a major role in building the case for invading and occupying Iraq. In 2002 Rice told CNN that Saddam Hussein was “actively pursuing” nuclear weapons, and that “the problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” On March 19, 2003 George W. Bush launched the war that Rice advocated. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq. As of this writing 4,489 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq and 32,021 were wounded. Estimates of Iraqi civilian fatalities range from over a hundred thousand to half a million. The U.S. has spent over $2 trillion on the war in Iraq… so far.

On June 19, 2014 President Obama announced he was prepared to launch “targeted airstrikes” against Sunni militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to stop them from toppling the U.S. backed regime of Shiite president Nouri al-Maliki. The president also announced he was sending 300 military advisers to “retrain Iraqi security forces” in the fight against ISIS. Moreover, he made it known that he would not seek congressional authority for his military invention. In true Orwellian fashion, Mr. Obama said that the U.S. soldiers entering the blood-spattered sectarian battlefield that is Iraq, would “not be returning to combat.”

It is easy to imagine the president’s “targeted and precise military action” spilling over into neighboring Syria, where ISIS terrorists and other Islamic militias are also fighting to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad, an insurgency that Obama supports and arms. But if he wants to stop the insurrection in Iraq, it is going to take more than 300 soldiers and a few airstrikes. When ISIS seized the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, they looted $425 million from Mosul’s central bank and took control of a vast arsenal left behind by the U.S. – Humvees, helicopters, trucks, tanks, artillery pieces, and huge amounts of automatic rifles and ammunition.

The current failing of the imperial project in Iraq comes to mind when thinking of Condolezza Rice, who helped to set off Iraq’s conflagration in 2003. And while Steven Polson’s name is not a household word, he is undeniably doing well for himself, proof positive that talented but uncritical artists are rewarded for their subservience to power. Woe to the obstinate nation; recent Secretaries of State cannot hold a candle to Thomas Jefferson, and our contemporary artists have no discernment when it comes to the powers of reasoning.