Do I detect the whiff of another Condi Rice fuck up?

“Which is it going to be, that’s all? The conspiracy or the fuck-up?” - Le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy.

The New York Times has an article on Condi Rice’s visit to Georgia, just a month before that country made the unfortunate decision to roll its forces into South Ossetia.

During a private dinner on July 9, Ms. Rice’s aides say, she warned President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia not to get into a military conflict with Russia that Georgia could not win. “She told him, in no uncertain terms, that he had to put a non-use of force pledge on the table,” according to a senior administration official who accompanied Ms. Rice to the Georgian capital.

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In the five days since the simmering conflict between Russia and Georgia erupted into war, Bush administration officials have been adamant in asserting that they warned the government in Tbilisi not to let Moscow provoke it into a fight — and that they were surprised when their advice went unheeded. Right up until the hours before Georgia launched its attack late last week in South Ossetia, Washington’s top envoy for the region, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, and other administration officials were warning the Georgians not to allow the conflict to escalate.

But as Ms. Rice’s two-pronged visit to Tbilisi demonstrates, the accumulation of years of mixed messages may have made the American warnings fall on deaf ears.

So Condi’s flunkies are insisting she warned Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili not to use force in Ossetia and provoke the Russians — not during any formal meeting but at a “private dinner.” How does that work? “This wine is lovely — but be careful if you roll your spetsnatz into Ossetia.”

And when signs appeared that a Georgian military move into Ossetia was in the offing, of course Rice immediately took personal action to prevent a catastrophic clash between Georgia and its massive neighbor, right? Well, um, no — not personally.

Ms. Rice did not get on the phone with her Georgian counterpart on Thursday, but left it to Mr. Fried to deliver the “don’t go in” message, a senior administration official said. “I don’t think it would have made any difference if she had,” the official said. “They knew the message was coming from the top.”

Well, fuck me. They “knew the message was from the top,” and yet Rice was too busy (was she shopping for shoes again?) to pick up a phone and call Saakashvili, who in just a day or so was on television delivering an impassioned plea for Western intervention against the Russians. You think the actual Secretary of State engaging in an actual discussion might have made a difference?

Maybe so, maybe not. But Georgia’s action shortly upon the heels of Madame Secretary’s visit has all the markings of yet another Rice fuck up.