[Mb-civic] Rice's Mission to Foggy Bottom - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Rice's Mission to Foggy Bottom

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, August 25, 2005; Page A19

Using a mixture of moxie and charm, Condoleezza Rice has improved 
relations with some of President Bush's harshest critics overseas. The 
secretary of state will now try to work the same wonders with the 
battle-hardened policy warriors in her own bureaucracy.

"Running a very big organization is something that I always enjoyed," 
the former provost of Stanford University said in her State Department 
office the other day. "People are surprised that I go through budget 
reviews, but paying attention to detail is part of the challenge that 
comes with running an organization of 50,000 employees."

To change the world, Bush believes that he must change Washington. To 
save the world, many diplomats at the State Department believe that they 
must change the foreign policy visions conjured up in the White House. 
Rice now occupies the crucial middle ground in a clash of ideas and 
political cultures.

Despite her success in defusing tensions with allies abroad in her first 
seven months, Rice still invites skepticism from mid-level Foreign 
Service officers who bridle at the thought of their beloved State 
Department becoming "White House Annex 2."

Some of the skepticism is nostalgia for Colin Powell, who spent his time 
fighting the White House and placating the Foreign Service bureaucracy 
in the name of morale-building. And some of the resistance stems from 
the condition known as clientitis, with foreign nations being favored 
clients or potential future employers.

But this is not just another entrenched bureaucracy fighting to defend 
perks and turf. To succeed in the foreign policy battle of Washington, 
Bush and Rice will need to recognize and accommodate the idealism and 
sense of history that fuel the State Department's strongly held value 
system.

The Foreign Service's Olympian view of current events discounts an 
administration's ideology and political needs of the day. That puts the 
State Department at odds with any president -- John F. Kennedy called it 
the Fudge Factory -- but particularly with the passionate, brash Bush, 
who does not hide his disdain for diplomatic niceties.

Bush and his immediate staff have flattened the Washington policy 
landscape by centralizing policymaking in the White House to a degree 
that most presidents have only dreamt about, leaving Cabinet departments 
to implement Bush's decisions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/24/AR2005082401833.html?nav=hcmodule
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