Rifts widen in Bush's foreign policy team

"Presidents always look bad when their main advisers are squabbling publicly over what the White House should be doing or has done," says James Lindsay, a foreign-policy expert with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "It hurts the president especially in this case because he's been under such criticism from Democrats for not coming clean on the intelligence aspects of the Iraq war."

Mac Destler, an expert in US foreign policy at the University of Maryland, recalls that Ronald Reagan, as a candidate against an incumbent president, criticized Jimmy Carter for a foreign policy team that failed to speak with one voice. "The problem for a president is that if [the division] reaches critical mass," he says, "it can end up diluting what should be a political advantage for the incumbent."

But Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, says the Bush team has been "remarkably unified" on the issue of going to war with Iraq. She suspects that "people are so habituated to hearing about the deep divisions in the administration over foreign policy matters that they are looking for them." That doesn't mean they don't exist - they do on some issues, she says, like North Korea and Iran - just not over the justification of war with Iraq.

How Bush's foreign policy might shift if he is reelected will hinge on key appointments. Powell, who customarily answers questions about his tenure by saying he serves at the pleasure of the president, is not expected to return for a second term.

Many observers say some of Powell's recent actions, like his qualifying his enthusiasm for war and reemphasis on multilateral action, reflect a man trying to set the record straight on his legacy. "He's on his way out, so he's paying a little more attention to his place in history in these final months," says one insider at the State Department. "He's the good soldier as everybody says, but he also knows there are already books being written about him. He wants it remembered that he's the one who convinced the president to go to the UN before going to war, things like that."

Closer to the president, Ms. Rice has said this will be her last year in the White House - though that careful language does not rule out taking the top slot either at State or at the Pentagon. How Bush would fill those positions would reveal the way he wants America to be viewed by the world. Noting that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz - dubbed the architect of the Iraq war - would love to take over at State, former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb says "that certainly sends a very different signal than if you pick a Senator [Richard] Lugar or [Chuck] Hagel," two moderate Republicans.

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