The Second-Term Cabinet; Who should go, who should stay?

Maybe Ashcroft will be a supreme court judge nominee!

You're dead wrong on that one Bear. Bush intentionally surrounds himself with people who will disagree with him when warranted and who will disagree with each other. Much has been made of such disagreement in the first four years in a 'trouble in River City' kind of way, but many of us see this as a healthy and positive thing.

Ashcroft has made enemies yes. But I believe history will show that he in fact has been the architect of security policies since 9/11 that has kept us free of attack since that time. Maybe it would be helpful to have more of a diplomat in that post, but I sure don't want somebody more moderate and thus more tolerant of potential for terrorism.

End of Discussion

Condoleezza Rice, the woman nominated to fill Colin Powell's chair at the Department of State, possesses an important diplomatic virtue: She can be completely inscrutable, refusing to reveal her inner thoughts to the press or to the world. But, on one matter, Condi is clear. She is absolutely loyal to the president, so deferential that, as New York magazine reported, at a Washington dinner party earlier this year, Rice casually and accidentally referred to her employer, George W. Bush, as her "husband." Of course, there's a long history of presidents installing political confidants in Foggy Bottom. But Rice's appointment is an important omen of the coming term. It portends an administration that has interpreted its electoral victory as evidence that its policies are, objectively, successful and believes that the biggest problem of the first term was an excessive openness to competing views.

Let's begin with the obvious. The last four years can hardly be described as a resounding foreign policy triumph. While Iraq still offers remote hopes of democratic self-rule, the nation seems well on its way to becoming a gangster's paradise engulfed by civil war. The Bush administration presided over the Abu Ghraib scandal and then tried to cover up the culpability of top officials. Meanwhile, it has turned a blind eye to proliferation in North Korea and Iran, sins of omission that make the dreaded nexus of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction more dangerous than before. It has also alienated much of Europe, as well as allies across the globe.

Faced with these failures, you would think that this transitional moment might offer a convenient opportunity to retire the architects of these debacles--or that a chief executive might want to infuse some new blood into the ranks of his deputies. But the Bush administration has always had a peculiar human resources policy. It doesn't punish incompetence. Instead, it rewards it with extensions of tenure and promotions, so long as the incompetents prove their absolute loyalty.

There's perfect internal logic, therefore, in Rice's replacement of Powell. Where Rice completely backed the administration's Iraq policy, Powell wasn't such a team player. To be sure, he didn't always challenge his ideological foes with persistence or genuine courage. But he at least had the intellectual honesty to occasionally raise important objections about policies toward Iraq and North Korea--objections made vigorously enough to ruin his relationships with Dick Cheney and the Pentagon. These objections may have led to Powell, as some have suggested, leaving State several months earlier than he had planned. Indeed, his departure fits the pattern set by Paul O'Neill and Lawrence Lindsey. In the Bush administration, there is really only one crime worthy of internal exile or firing: dissent.

It gets worse. Rice has been sent to State with a mission. According to press reports, she wants to overhaul her new organization. On its own, this might be a reasonable goal: Foggy Bottom's bureaucracy can be sclerotic. But, given this administration's history, it is hard not to regard her talk of transformation as a pretext for purging critics. After all, a leitmotif of this administration has been its scandalous treatment of the bureaucrats who have historically supplied policymakers with objective analysis--a disregard for empiricism that has extended to the suppression of findings produced by Environmental Protection Agency scientists and Treasury Department economists.

Now, it appears that the White House wants to take its war against bureaucrats to the institutions of foreign policy. It's not just the desire to sap power from the civil servants at State. There are signs--especially the recent firing of high-ranking officials and the departure of several others--that the administration wants to impose new restraints on the CIA, rendering its critics there impotent.

Much of the press still fails to wrap its mind around this agenda. Even after the Iraq war, journalists imagine that circumstances will force the Bush administration to trim its sails and follow a more modest international course. But there is a lesson to be learned from the first term: This president should be taken at his word. The radical foreign policy he outlines isn't merely rhetorical. He really does believe that his electoral victory proves he has made no mistakes. And, if history didn't provide enough clues about his instincts, Rice's ascendance should leave no doubt about where this administration is headed--full steam in the same perilous direction.

the Editors

would like it if Tom Ridge would leave too.