Condoleezza Rice may be the apple of U.S. President George W. Bush's eye, but in Europe her nomination as Secretary of State is being met with disappointment and dismay.

The long-anticipated resignations of the respected state secretary, Colin Powell, and his tough, able deputy, Richard Armitage, leave U.S. foreign policy in the hands of bellicose VP Dick Cheney and his neocon Pentagon allies. The new National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, is a bland functionary well known for being under Cheney's thumb.

Powell, an honourable soldier and gentleman, was humiliated, ignored, and cynically used to sell the Iraq war. He made a fool of himself before the world with his UN presentation about Iraq's supposed arsenal of death.

In my view, Rice, an academic Soviet expert, has been the worst national security adviser since the Reagan administration's bumbling William Clark, whose only foreign affairs experience, wags said, came from eating at the International House of Pancakes.

But Rice is totally loyal to Bush, a consummate yes-woman in an administration prizing subservience and the party line. At least she will speak abroad with full presidential authority.

Prior to 9/11, Rice advocated cutting anti-terrorism spending and concentrating on anti-missile defence. She played a key role in misleading Americans into believing Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam posed a dire threat. She urged Bush to invade Iraq and plunge deeper into Afghanistan. Her ludicrous claims about Iraqi "mushroom clouds" panicked many Americans. For this alone she should have been dismissed.

The most important function of national security adviser -- and I can say this having myself been interviewed at the White House for a position on the National Security Council -- is to co-ordinate all national security policy. But under Rice, defence, state and CIA were at each other's throats. She allowed the president to humiliate himself over Iraq's non-existent weapons, Saddam's uranium and "drones of death."

After the European powers refused to join the trumped-up Iraq war, Rice famously advised Bush to "punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia." Bush followed this amateurish, vindictive misadvice, seriously damaging U.S.-Europe relations and helping advance dictatorship in Russia.

Bush's second-term foreign policy may grow even more aggressive, unilateralist, and driven by right-wing ideology and religious zealotry.

Fortunately, Bush's declared intention to pursue his ideological crusading will be curtailed by the fact that he has run out of more soldiers and money for new military adventures.

Educated Americans must yearn for foreign policy greats George Marshall, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and Zib Brzesinski whose brilliant strategic minds ably guided the U.S. through the Cold War.

Instead, we have Rice, who, whatever she may know about outside world, knows a lot about Bush, with whom she reportedly likes to belt out gospel hymns. And at the Pentagon, that latter-day Robert McNamara, Don Rumsfeld, is stuck in a lost war in Iraq engineered by the neocons.

CIA's new chief, Porter Goss, another Bush yes-man, whose agency is in revolt, just issued a ukase to all CIA officers ordering them to obey Bush's party line or else. Such boot-licking is how the Bush administration got so much wrong about Iraq.

Attorney General John Aschroft blessedly took his leave. But further dashing hopes Bush would soften and upgrade his cabinet, Ashcroft is to be replaced by an unknown lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, whose main claim to fame is authoring a memo to the president saying the "quaint" Geneva Conventions governing treatment and torture of prisoners did not apply to al-Qaida or the war in Afghanistan -- an act that hardly merits elevation to high office.

The image of Condi Rice and George Bush sitting at the White House piano singing Onward Christian Soldiers is unsettling Europe, which thought Bush II might restore America to its traditional multilateral foreign policy. Even Bush's faithful British retainer, Tony Blair, is looking increasingly unhappy.

© 2004 Toronto Sun

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