Why the president stopped listening to Powell:

“In the seemingly endless litany of Middle East violence, it was two suicide bombings in two days last week that fractured Yasser Arafat’s tenuous relations with the Bush administration once and for all.

The president’s rose garden address on Monday not only marked a clear break with the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it also reflected a decisive shift in the constellation of forces within the administration itself, which have blown US policy back and forth for the past 18 months.” Guardian UK

Essentially — Colin Powell drags Bush kicking and screaming into the realms of statesmanship, only to find that Bush doesn’t have the taste, the grasp, the aptitude, or the henchmen to sustain the effort at diplomacy. Will Powell be marginalized further in the Administration, or extruded totally?