Many ethnic Armenians who read ex-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recently published memoirs ("No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington") are spitting fire over her descriptions of her battles with the US-based Diaspora Armenian lobby. 

Both in 1991 as a presidential aide (to then US President George Bush) and in 2007 as secretary of state (under then President George W. Bush), Rice worked to defeat the congressional push for recognizing the World-War I-era slaughter of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks as genocide.

While acknowledging the brutality and the scale of the bloodshed, Rice writes that US recognition of the act as genocide would have antagonized Turkey, a key strategic ally for the US. She argues that she was guided by the raison d'état that labels are best left to historians....