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"A major problem, critics said, is Miss Rice's ignorance of the Middle East. They said the secretary relies completely on Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who is largely regarded as the architect of U.S. foreign policy."

No one need look any further than Nicholas Burns - he with a long history rotating in and out of State Department, congressional staffs and think tanks, leaving the State Department sometime early in the first Bush administration to become a senior foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaign of...................................................................... .............................................................................

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John Kerry.

Burns then got rehired at State by Condi after Colin left.

That's the facts.

Do you think Colin knew something Condi didn't? And are you the least bit curious how Condi - with her "loyalty to Bush" - reconciled herself to Burn's active work on behalf of Kerry?

I brought this strange fact up to Condi's defenders here months ago when - after repeated warnings directly from Abbas - Condi claimed to be surprised by the Hamas election victory. I said then she has been captured by the experienced permanent government types like Burns, who, like the executives of a dying multinational conglomerate believe their own PR against all observable evidence to the contrary - the world is always as they believe it to be, not as it really is. Condi might truthfully be naive as to the validity of the "exerienced advice" of the snakes like Burns who manage to sell appeasment as a strength.