I don't know... However, whomever will succeed Sharon is gonna be even more tied up with Washington... The next Israeli PM will have to draw a lesson from Sharon's failure to (successfully) play hardball with Arafat...
Here's an interesting article on SuperCondi, Bush's eminence noire...
Ascent of Bush Security Chief
Jane Perlez New York Times Service
Monday, August 20, 2001
Rice Takes Highly Active Role in Making Foreign Policy
WASHINGTON As Secretary of State Colin Powell's blue and white aircraft taxied onto the runway at Andrews Air Force Base last month to fly west on a five-country swing through Asia, another air force Boeing 757 was being readied to head east with the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
Secretary Powell's trip was important but relatively routine for someone in his post, the high point being a meeting with the Chinese leadership on issues ranging from security to human rights to a planned visit to China by President George W. Bush.
Ms. Rice's mission was important, too, but exceptional for a national security adviser. She traveled to Moscow to meet with the Russian president to discuss the foreign policy issue that the Bush administration singularly cares about: missile defense. The trip meant that Ms. Rice, and not the secretary of state, was the first top Bush foreign policy official to visit Moscow, whose opposition to a missile shield is a critical obstacle to be navigated.
"Her mission to Moscow was unprecedented," said Ivo Daalder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, who is writing a history of national security advisers. "No national security adviser since Kissinger has gone on a routine diplomatic mission to Moscow," he said, referring to Henry Kissinger, who held the post during President Richard Nixon's first term.
The contrasting missions of General Powell and Ms. Rice illustrated the differing, and surprising, roles that Mr. Bush's two top foreign policy officials have adopted so far.
Ms. Rice, 46, came to Washington signaling that she would play the traditional role of national security adviser: a broker between competing views, a manager of options but not an operating officer in the manner of her immediate predecessor, Samuel Berger, or Mr. Kissinger, decades earlier. Instead, she has quickly amassed power and turned out to be a very active and very public maker of foreign policy, administration officials and outside experts say. In particular, she has insinuated herself as an aggressive advocate and top thinker on missile defense - the keystone of the Bush administration's foreign policy and the one area where the White House believes it can make discernible progress by the 2004 presidential elections.
In contrast, Secretary Powell has been engaged in a host of foreign policy issues, from the Middle East to Asia, but he has been less bullish than many others in the administration on missile defense.
Ms. Rice's ascendancy, administration officials say, comes as she has aligned herself with the more conservative members of Mr. Bush's foreign policy team, leaving the State Department feeling "outnumbered," according to one of its senior officials.
[snip]
iht.com |
