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Greg Djerejian asks, "The big question is, will [Rice] really go to bat on policy issues where Cheney and Rummy are aligning on another side of the issue? Or will they all be operating in lockstep, as this Glenn Kessler piece suggests?"
I don't think there is any question that Rice will not go to bat on policy issues where Cheney and Rummy are aligning on the other side. Rice has had the president's ear for four years of foreign policy disaster and reactiveness. She appears the consummate yes-person for her bosses. When has she ever shown an iota of independence?
I saw her speak at the US Institute of Peace a couple months ago, a few months after I saw Powell speak there. She's smart, she's hyper-competent, she's articulate. But there was no energy in the room, no sense of a compelling vision, no twinge of inspiration as you get from Powell even as you're disappointed in him. It was just trying to do damage control, similar to her appearance at the 9/11 commission.
Does it matter? After all, the State Department hardly seemed to win many of the key inter-agency debates the past four years. Unfortunately, I am afraid it does. As this points out, Powell did win some important behind the scenes battle, particularly in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. With the departure of a powerful, moderate voice of reason, and his replacement with the consummate practitioner of getting rolled over by hardline heavyweights, there is no powerful counter to the radical ideologues. Partly it's a matter that Rice has made it her job the past four years to subsume her views, so it's hard to know what she really thinks. But she seems uniquely adept at basically becoming the party line of who she's working for, in a way that has proved disastrous at the NSC the past four years.
Update: James Wolcott gets this just right:
Rice's face is the game face of the Bushies, bony with Unwavering Resolve, eyes fanatical, mouth tensed. She has shown herself to be not a listener but a dictation machine on playback. "The President believes..." "The President has always said..." "The President has very consistent in arguing that..." "The President has said all along..." And now the dictation machine is in a position to dictate to other nations how they can fight terror and help make America a bigger, better empire. It'll be the President wants this, the President wants that, the President is firm in his belief that...
But her incompetence precedes her, as does her presumptuous statement that for their failure to support the U.S. in Iraq, France should be punished, Germany ignored, and Russia forgiven. Punished, ignored, and forgiven for being right in the first place and refusing to take part in this debacle?--such nerve.
As America gets more militarized and messianic under Bush, it's being economically and diplomatically outmaneuvered by the rest of the world...