The Condi Doctrine

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But on Iraq, Rice has been slow to find her footing. Critics say that early in the year, Rice's attention to Iraq's political process lacked focus, causing the U.S. to squander momentum that it is just starting to recover. "After the election, we basically became hands off in terms of the political dynamic," says Biden. "I don't see much of her input on Iraqi policy." Rice's aides insist she is actively engaged, receiving a daily briefing on the constitutional process, the disbursement of reconstruction aid and the U.S. military strategy. The chronic fractiousness in Iraq appears to have brought out her inner micromanager. In one instance last month, she authorized a team of diplomats, including her deputy senior adviser on Iraq, Robert Deutsch, to tell Kurdish leaders that the U.S. would deny reconstruction assistance in the flash-point city of Kirkuk and the surrounding province unless the Kurds gave four key government posts in the city to other ethnic groups. The Kurds eventually agreed to give the other ethnic groups three posts. And Rice aides say Khalilzad's arrival in Baghdad paid dividends last week when Iraqi parties agreed to finish drafting the outlines of a new constitution by Aug. 15. "There's a reason we have an activist ambassador out there," says a senior official.

But it's not clear that anything Rice has done has brought the U.S. significantly closer to extricating itself from Iraq or preventing a slide into civil war. When pressed on what it will take to tamp down the insurgency, Rice offers vagaries about process rather than concrete policy initiatives--such as reconfiguring the electoral process to ensure greater Sunni representation in the government or trying to get Iraq's Arab neighbors to negotiate a settlement with hard-line Sunni groups. "I do think the insurgency has a problem, which is that as the political process matures and the Iraqis every day accept the political process as their future, [the insurgents] become more and more isolated from the population and they become nothing but a destructive force," Rice told TIME. But that's a hope, not a strategy--and people who know Rice say they have strained to figure out whether she has come up with one. Capitol Hill Democrats and even some Republicans fault her for failing to enlist Iraq's neighbors in the political reconstruction of the country. A former government official says that when he spoke to Rice after a recent visit to Iraq, she was unresponsive to his concerns about the lack of clarity in U.S. policy. "She just looks at you, and you don't know if she's really listening or if she's getting ready to give her next speech."