Mark Byron has an excellent point on the challenges Condi Rice will face:
The problem is going to be respecting the career diplomats while telling them that they're wrong on a regular basis.
Rice's job is to get the Bush administration's policy goals done by the State Department employees without turning them into groupthinkers who can't form or express a dissenting opinion when merited. Part of a good career diplomat's job is to know their turf and be able to say "that's not going to work in X, and here's why." Condi's job will be to take that advice at time and tweak the American policy into a more palatable format, or to tell the staffer "it's your job to make it work, even if it ticks off your golfing buddies" when the policy can't be tweaked.
I think Mark has this exactly right. One of the biggest problems with having Colon Powell at State was that he wasn't fully on board with the Administration's war-time policies. As a result, the messages coming out of State were often confused and confusing. Generally speaking on major issues that had been decided at the cabinet level or above Powell generally towed the line. However, when it came to the details Powell often seemed to have been co-opted by the bureaucracy. The result was that at many times the State Department seemed to be working at odds to the official policy.
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