In an answer to a question from the floor, she told her audience that in 1947 Greece and Turkey had suffered through civil wars. Greece, yes, but Turkey?

“It was a glaring mistake,” said Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States, an independent research organization at the French Institute of International Relations. “She’s smart, yes, but I don’t think she is as knowledgeable as one would expect with a career like hers.”

She shocked at least some of her guests by branding Iran a “totalitarian state,” said four of those who took part. She added that the free world was wrong to accept the Soviet Union on its terms during the cold war and must not make the same mistake now with Iran, they added.

A number of guests challenged her assertion, but Ms. Rice is not the type to back down. She called her characterization of Iran deliberate. A year ago, she said, she would have called Iran’s Islamic Republic authoritarian. But after flawed parliamentary elections last spring that produced a conservative majority, she said, it moved toward totalitarian, a term that historians tend to use restrictively to define violently absolutist regimes that govern through terror.

“I tried to explain that Iran was not like the Soviet Union, that the mullahs were deeply unpopular but unlike their predecessors over the last 150 years they were not in the hands of the British or the Russians or the Americans,” said François Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “She gave no proof that Iran was totalitarian, because she didn’t have any. It was scary. Unless there is some give on the American side we are heading for a real crisis.”

“I told her that it is my sense that public opinion in Europe, and maybe even elected officials, are ready to accept the idea that Iran may have some kind of nuclear weapons capability with some limitations,” said Nicole Bacharan, an expert on the United States at the Institute of Political Studies. “She was startled. She wasn’t quite aware of what she is up against.”

While most of the discussion focused on Iran, Ms. Rice was much more willing to absolve Pakistan’s military-led government of any tyrannical tendencies. When Mr. Parmentier called Pakistan “the most dangerous country there is,” Ms. Rice acknowledged that the country was dangerous but said it was “on the right track” and “improving,” participants said. ~The New York Times

Secretary Rice’s legendary (and it may indeed be nothing more than a legend) intelligence seems to have done her little good on her European visit. She seems to have been coddled, to the extent that she was welcomed at all, because of insubstantial matters of style and personality (and probably not a little because she is a minority woman), and on substance she not only failed to convince but demonstrated more evidence that she is simply unfit, both in her rhetoric and her knowledge, for her post. The liability of having an old Soviet hand at the helm of State is that she seems surprisingly uninformed about the history and politics of any other part of the world. If she was “startled” that Europeans would be willing to tolerate an Iranian nuclear weapons program, then she needs to read a newspaper or watch some news that is not owned by DowJones or NewsCorp.

I am an amateur at foreign affairs and modern European history, but I knew that Turkey had not had a civil war in the ’40s (or at any other time since the very earliest days of Ataturk, and even then not much of one) and I was certain that Iran was not what any normal person could call “totalitarian.” How does such a clumsy and uninformed person become the Secretary of State of the United States?

Some of this is simply the lack of imagination and political illiteracy of the circles in which Secretary Rice has moved: to describe a government that one finds insufficiently liberal, the terminology of these ideologues is limited to such worn-out terms as “fascist” or “totalitarian.” Fascist is preferred among most neocon pundits, for whom ‘totalitarian’ is perhaps too long and difficult to write, but they are willing to wheel it out on special occasions. Tyranny is now one of the preferred terms, more flexible and difficult to really test against any strict standards of conduct (on Iranian revolutionary terms or Shi’i clerical terms, very little in Iranian government could be called tyrannical).

But the secretary chose to use ‘totalitarian’, a term that has become so detached from its original Italian context and meaning that it might need to be retired from the political lexicon of our times. For the original totalitarian, it meant the complete integration of society in common cause, what might be called solidarity today in the more mundane leftist language of the Europeans, and the state was to serve as the coordinating agent of that integration: Catholic corporatism, social democracy and fascism could all be understood as representing different kinds of totalitarianism in a fairly neutral sense. For what it is worth, an Islamic theocracy would probably understand itself in a similarly solidarist sense, probably to an even higher degree, as that religion ultimately recognises no real distinction between properly religious and political activities or affairs. That is not what Secretary Rice meant, and it is why she has not been taken seriously by any Europeans who know the first thing about Iran.

To invoke ‘totalitarianism’ is to invoke death camps, mass slaughter, gulags, purges and political executions en masse, all of which do not exist in Iran on any scale remotely comparable to those few governments that might legitimately deserve the name: China, the USSR and Germany, c. 1941-45. No one interested in a peaceful resolution with Iran would use such insulting language, and that is precisely why the secretary used it.