When George Bush was elected for another term in the White House, his National Security Advisor - Condoleezza Rice - said she was either moving up, or moving out. It looks like she got her way: White House officials say Ms Rice is set to replace outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"She has an established reputation - also in academia - as a scholar in foreign relations, particularly the Cold War relation to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, she hasn't really put herself on the map over the last four years in the battle of these political juggernauts, mastodons like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney."
"And the way that her predecessor in the job, Colin Powell, was sort of slowly ground down and was made to do things like this shameful show at the United Nations where he tried with the help of space photographs to prove the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction… Shortly after he got to know that this was fake, that he was made to show fake photographs there. That, as I see it, is the moment when he should have stepped down as a man of honour. He didn't, since he's also a man of military honour, and he decided to keep serving his chief commander."
"So now he steps down, which is still seen as a demonstration, I think; the sign of a man who has had enough of this, who is tired of fighting the war between these neo-cons, hard-line foreign policy people. And I wonder whether Condoleezza Rice has the grit to do better
being caught in the middle the way that Powell was."
http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/html/us041116.html