It's the Condi Rice Show

Back in 2003, Condoleezza Rice, then the National Security Adviser, decided that U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer's plan for getting a government going in Iraq wasn't viable. Without telling Bremer or his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Rice went to President George W. Bush after her summer vacation to put the viceroy on a shorter leash. She knew that the President exercised with Bremer when he visited Washington, appreciated his strong Catholic faith and treated him like a Cabinet member. But she drew on her even deeper bond with the President. She soft-pedaled her views of Bremer's record so as not to make it personal and got herself put in charge of Iraq policy.

The episode, a precursor of Rice's outmaneuvering of Bush hard-liners when she became Secretary of State, is revealed in Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a forthcoming book about the Green Zone by the Washington Post's former Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The details were confirmed for TIME by an official who was involved, who added a telling coda: Bremer actually liked the new arrangement because he "got to deal with Condi, who had the President's ear." Since moving out of the West Wing to take over State in early 2005, Rice has returned there often and has remained close to the President and First Lady. Now the President's hopes for becoming a Middle East peacemaker lie with the imperturbable and at times inflexible concert pianist and childhood championship ice skater he calls "an unsticker"--a solver of insoluble problems.

Rice announced before heading off to Israel and Lebanon last week that she was not after "a temporary solution," much to the consternation of Arab and European allies of the U.S. The New York Times ran a vivid front-page photo of Rice, eyes closed, holding her head as if in despair. In fact, she was wiping off perspiration that was pouring down her forehead in a broiling conference room in Rome. (The hall normally seats about 100 people but was packed with 1,000; firefighters showed up to remove doors to cool the place down.) Her goal is grander than the instant results demanded by her critics. She says she is after nothing less than a changed Middle East, which requires more than a cease-fire that could quickly be breached. As White House press secretary Tony Snow put it, the objective is to "create the conditions so that you not only have the piece of paper, you have the peace."

Rice has greater access and latitude than any Secretary of State since Henry Kissinger left government after Gerald Ford lost in 1976, and she has capitalized on every bit of it. Many senior officials at the National Security Council are Rice loyalists who date back to her days there, so the State Department and the White House work closely together and sometimes cut the Pentagon out, according to participants. Until now, she has won generally glowing marks for a record that includes offering the first substantive talks with Iran in 27 years. But some Bush aides were miffed that she embarked on what they sarcastically called the "Condi Rice Show" without a clearly attainable goal. Her initial round of diplomacy in the Israel-Hizballah hostilities was mostly portrayed as a failure, and she looked drained as she emerged from a meeting of world powers in Rome, where many allies had pushed to call for an immediate cease-fire.