Rice

The Washington Post has a really interesting look at Condoleezza Rice's transformation of the State Department since she took over from Colin Powell.

In six months, she's manged to get North Korea back to the table, taken a new approach to Iran, forged deeper ties with India, and so startled the prime minister of Luxembourg with tough talk on the arms embargo against China that he spilled his coffee in the lap of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

I wonder if this is one of those "Only Nixon could have gone to China" kind of phenomena. She's restarted dialogue with North Korea, Iran and Syria after years of going nowhere fast. Why couldn't Powell -- said to be one of the administration's foremost proponents of statesmanship -- do these sorts of things? Perhaps it was because the others viewed everything he did with suspicion whereas Rice has the full trust and support of Bush.

This is also a nice opportunity to once again pitch The Rise of the Vulcans by Jim Mann about Bush's war cabinet. The book profiles Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Powell and Armitage. It's essential reading for anyone interested in how these people formed their philosophy and how they rose to power.

As another Vulcan would have said, it's "fascinating".