There she was playing her Brahms sonata, while 5,000 miles away the Mideast burned. It was all too tempting for columnists to make snarky references to Nero and his fiddle, and a few did. But Condoleezza Rice clearly had more on her mind than the annual song-and-dance show put on by ministers at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum, a sideshow conference Rice had skipped just the year before. She knew she would very shortly return to the Mideast-after giving the Israelis a little more time to inflict damage—to play a central role on perhaps the biggest diplomatic stage of her life. And she knew she had directed her top aides—Nicholas Burns in New York, Philip Zelikow in Brussels, David Welch and Elliott Abrams in Jerusalem—to prepare for her main act this week while she played the piano in faraway Malaysia.
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