The foreign policy pressure cooker

GOP rifts deepen as White House takes hold of policy reigns

Three weeks after trumping Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s influence over Iraq policy with a strategically leaked memorandum, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice moved again this weekend to centralize foreign policy making inside the White House, pulling the plug on a bipartisan congressional visit to North Korea led by a Republican whose last visit there, in May, helped to convince the Bush administration that offering written security guarantees to the North might help avert a war.

A SENIOR STATE Department official told reporters on Monday that the trip was cancelled to keep North Korea focused on multilateral talks aimed at containing its nuclear ambitions. “Obviously, we’ve reached a stage with the possibility of six party talks that that remains the channel, the emphasis for us,” the senior official said on condition of anonymity.

http://msnbc.com/news/986163.asp?0cv=CB10

I guess this also underscores that Colin Powell is totally irrelevant these days.

and he's still a good frontman for convincing the Europeans that there is at one voice of "reason" in the Bu$$$h misadministration.