Peddling U.S. foreign policy six years into an administration that has pursued the course that President Bush has set could be compared to marketing pet food after unknown brands and quantities have proved fatal to the little dears.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

Nonetheless, my conclusion as a retired 35-year U.S. diplomat after two days of briefings by the Department of State's most senior people with a group of editorial writers is that U.S. diplomacy, for the most part, is still in competent hands. We had substantial time and good opportunity to question Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, Undersecretary for Political Affairs Nick Burns, North Korea negotiating star Chris Hill and a host of others.

So that no one thinks I am losing my edge in dealing with my former colleagues, I tried with each, including Ms. Rice, to ask sharp questions that were hard to evade even by wily diplomats. (The department's private theme song remains "Little White Lies.")

I found Ms. Rice to be subtle, sophisticated and a little defensive in her conceptualization and articulation of administration policy and practice. She acknowledged that Israeli-Palestinian relations, which she has been assigned to resuscitate, "had been under a good deal of strain for the last six years since the end of the Camp David effort." Ms. Rice's current level of realism and frankness are revealed by the fact that the "six years" mentioned are the six years of the Bush administration and that the Camp David effort was carried out under Democratic auspices.

I asked Ms. Rice if the U.S. decision to meet bilaterally with North Korea, which unlocked the door to the so-far successful process now under way with that country, might not be applicable also to the U.S. approach to Syria and/or Iran. Her first reply was basically negative, but then she moved around to saying that, with respect to Iran it might be useful at some point to have a bilateral encounter that moved forward eventual seven-party negotiations. She finished her answer on a terrifyingly academic note, to the effect that any discussion was a matter of "aligning properly the incentives and disincentives for behavioral change." Oh, dear.

I was very interested to have a look at new Deputy Secretary John Negroponte, to try to figure out why he recently gave up his job as director of national intelligence, with massive responsibilities, to take the No. 2 job at state under Ms. Rice. My own theory is that he may have reason to believe that toward the end of the Bush administration, he will become secretary of state, even if only for a short period. Career Foreign Service Officer Lawrence Eagleburger was deputy secretary in 1992 when Secretary James A. Baker III went off to try to save the flagging reelection campaign of President George H. W. Bush. Mr. Eagleburger was secretary of state for only five months, but he nonetheless goes down in the history books as having held the position.

Mr. Negroponte probably has a broader grasp of U.S. foreign policy, with extensive experience in different regions, including in Washington and as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, than anyone else serving in the U.S. government now. He thinks in broad lines, which subsume the sometimes gory details.

There were other, less enlightening exchanges between the intrepid journalists and the taxpayers' servants. Asking whether there was any reason other than Israeli objections why the United States did not talk to Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon, we were told that to do so would be to undercut Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah Party lost the January '06 elections to Hamas, and Lebanon's widely hated prime minister, Fouad Siniora.

A Bush administration political appointee serving in a senior Department of State position after working for a former, regrettable senator, when asked what confidence the United States had in Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, made it clear that we were working with Mr. Musharraf with our eyes wide shut. He painted the Pakistani president, in effect, as a sort of Barack Obama of South Asia. Difficult to imagine.

We spent an astonishing hour with the head of the office that deals with international efforts to combat avian and pandemic influenza. The world seems to be pretty much on top of the problem, but, according to the State Department, if it ever got to the United States and went out of control it could infect an estimated 1.9 million people, which is why we are spending $434 million preparing for it. So far, since it first turned up in 1997 it has infected 300 people and killed 70 worldwide. Americans have generally lost interest in bird flu, probably because they have become inured to various Bush administration efforts to scare them.

Finally, on a positive note, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Chris Hill, who seems to have brought off the nuclear accord with North Korea, presented a cautious but candid picture of what is basically one of the few real successes in Bush administration foreign policy. He laid out the complexity of the problem presented by what we know of North Korea's nuclear program at this point and how we get from that to some sort of level of comfort with its capabilities. He made it clear that the United States would be able to get nowhere with North Korea without the full cooperation of China. He was also clear that at the core of North Korean concerns was money, sometimes not even much money. Kim Jong Il's country is broke and scrabbling for pennies. On the one hand that is a vulnerability; on the other it means that negotiating with them is a slow, tedious procedure.

The current fence we are scrambling over is some $25 million of North Korea's money which the U.S. Treasury Department has blocked in 52 accounts in the Banco Delta Asia of Macau. That bank has been less than transparent in its dealings in general, and downright opaque when it comes to North Korean accounts, so the United States walled it off, with North Korea's money inside. U.S. officials now plan to let the money go.