Rice's Toughest Mission

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Rice also faces fierce challenges at home. In Congress, members of her own party have turned against the Iraq war and are finding it safe to criticize Rice and Bush for their handling of it. A Senate vote is likely next week on a bipartisan bill opposing Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq. Congressional Democrats have promised flurries of hearings on the war and the diplomacy surrounding it, which means Rice can expect to spend a lot more time answering her skeptics on the Hill.

This is not the messy state of affairs that Rice--the meticulously well-mannered, history-obsessed perfectionist--hoped to find herself in. If she has been more inclined than her peers to acknowledge the Administration's missteps, particularly in Iraq, she has yet to show she has the ability or will to correct them. Her accomplishments as Secretary of State have been modest, and even those have begun to fade. She pushed Bush to appoint the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, only to see him ignore the commission's call to pull back from the fight in Iraq; instead Bush plans to send more Americans there. She persuaded Bush to back European-led negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and even offer to talk directly to Tehran if it stopped enriching uranium. But she also supports the military's recent moves to beef up a presence in the Persian Gulf and target Iranian interests in Iraq. Although both Bush and Rice deny they have any hostile intent, there is anxiety in some foreign-policy circles that even as it struggles to avoid losing one war in Iraq, the Administration may provoke another one across the border in Iran.

The growing tension with Tehran illustrates the quandaries facing Rice. As America's top diplomat, she is judged by whether the U.S. can advance its interests without resorting to military force. But Rice hasn't distanced herself from the hawks in the White House, in part because Bush continues to identify with them. She has barely begun to address the damage to U.S. credibility wrought by Iraq or articulate a diplomatic strategy that might shore up U.S. influence and coax others to help contain Iraq's violence within its borders.

That may be starting to change. In conversations with her counterparts overseas--and in two interviews with TIME in the past month--Rice has sketched out a vision of a "new alignment" of forces in the Middle East, in which a "stabilizing" group of U.S. allies, like Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, could unite to contain the "destabilizing" threat posed by Iran and radical groups like Hamas and Hizballah. "There is a recognition that things are really splitting," Rice says, "with extremists on one side and what I call responsible [governments]--because they're not all reformers--on the other side."