The Rice Question - NYTimes.com Chris Hondros/Getty Images Susan Rice, United States ambassador to the United Nations and a leading candidate to become the next secretary of state. WHEN Thomas Pickering took up the No.3 position at the U.S. State Department in 1997, his attention turned to Sudan. The U.S. Embassy in Khartoum had been vacated the previous year after the C.I.A. reported threats, but Pickering wanted the mission reopened in a country that had harbored Osama bin Laden until May 1996 and had more experience than most with violent Islamist extremism. "The intelligence reports that prompted the closure of the embassy were false and I felt strongly that the embassy should be reopened," Pickering, who has served as ambassador to Nigeria, Israel, India, Russia and the United Nations, told me. But Susan Rice and Sandy Berger felt strongly it should remain closed and so it did not get reopened for a long while. Rice, now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a leading candidate along with Senator John Kerry to become the next secretary of state, was then assistant secretary for African affairs. She had strong views about Sudan and plenty of reasons to hold them: a terror-sponsoring Sudanese government playing host to anti-American Islamist radicals and engaged in a brutal war with its own citizens in the south. But while under no illusions about the Sudanese government, Pickering, then under secretary of state for political affairs, saw an opportunity to probe possible shifts in Khartoum. "My view was that we needed to be in contact with governments around the world whatever their characters, and we might change Sudan's attitude through being there," he said. Susan took a different view. Today we are at a crucial juncture for American power. President Obama's priority in preserving U.S. influence in the world must be domestic: reviving the economy. He needs a secretary of state able to chart her or his own course at times, with a team-of-rivals independence, and the ability to talk to enemies - Iran being top of that list. Susan Rice is certainly capable and tough. One person who has spent a lot of time with Rice is struck by her "bristling certitude." A former U.S. ambassador told me, "Rice does not know how to be unblunt." But it is her judgment at critical moments - as displayed on whether to reopen the Sudan embassy or in her handling of the talking points on the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans - that troubles me. Of course, the ultimate decision on returning U.S. diplomats to Khartoum in 1997 did not lie with Rice. Samuel R. Berger, as national security adviser to President Clinton, had more clout. Still, as the State Department's point person on Africa, her opinion had weight. Rice's thinking at the time, as described to me by several officials, ran like this: Reopening the U.S. Embassy would have been interpreted by the Sudanese as a reward for good behavior. The United States, she felt, could not send that signal to a country on the terrorist list and involved in the worst human rights abuses. Moreover, nothing she saw at the time suggested that the Sudanese offers of intelligence assistance were serious. What difference a U.S. decision to engage with Khartoum would have made to intelligence gathering on Al Qaeda, preventing the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, averting the mistaken 1998 U.S. cruise-missile attack on a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, and blocking the path to 9/11 is unclear. On one particular issue - whether in 1996 (when Rice was a senior director for Africa at the National Security Council) Sudan offered to hand over Bin Laden - the 9/11 Commission Report "found no credible evidence that this was so." "Ambassador Rice believes that it is far better to have a diplomatic presence than not," her spokeswoman, Erin Pelton, said in an e-mail message. Thus her inherent predisposition is to try to reopen embassies as soon as possible. However, when the U.S. is dealing with countries that are state sponsors of terrorism, that decision cannot be made without regard to the policy signal it sends. Tim Carney, the ambassador to Sudan at the time, had to leave the country in early 1996 when the embassy was vacated. He believes that the decision not to reopen the following year was disastrous. "We took our eye off the ball," he told me. We did not know what was happening in Khartoum, a center of extremist Islam. There was no logic to our policy beyond punishing Khartoum and supporting the rebellion in south Sudan. That the Sudanese could not ensure our security was complete and utter nonsense. In my experience, Rice failed in her judgment. Our interests suffered.