In public, Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have friendly relations, and their policy differences are cordial, if hard-argued. In private, Powell is said to roll his eyes at the volume of "Rummygrams" routinely sent his way that offer the Defense secretary's views on foreign policy.
However, at the day-to-day working level, mid-level State Department bureaucrats say they are alarmed by the ideological fervor of the Pentagon's civilian decision-makers and by how they leave State out of important decisions, brush aside the diplomats to get things done, or ignore tasks they do not want to perform.
After months of bitter battle over who should run postwar Iraq, the two departments finally agreed on L. Paul Bremer III, who was appointed Tuesday by Bush to be the top civilian administrator.
But in the larger ideological struggle, there is no compromise in sight.
Diplomats interviewed for this story -- all of whom insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the political infighting -- said they are profoundly worried about what they describe as the administration's arrogance or indifference to world public opinion, which they fear has wiped out, in less than two years, decades of effort to build goodwill toward the United States.
They cite as an example fallout from Iran being included in Bush's "axis of evil." Under the Clinton and Bush administrations, the State Department had been ordered to try to befriend Iranian moderates in order to counter that nation's Islamic fundamentalists. During the war in Afghanistan, American diplomats persuaded Tehran to allow U.S. military jets to fly over Iranian territory, a surprise foreign policy success.
However, within hours of Bush's State of the Union speech last year linking Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil," Tehran canceled U.S. overflight rights, according to two sources familiar with the negotiations.
"It has taken them an incredibly short time" to anger many other nations, said one veteran senior diplomat.
A mid-level official complained that intemperate remarks by administration hawks have damaged long-term American interests. "Goodwill is an element of national security -- and perhaps one of the most profound elements of national security," he said.
The long-simmering interagency battle burst into the open last month when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a close friend of Rumsfeld, accused the State Department of being "ineffective and incoherent" and of a near-treasonous failure to advance U.S. interests on the eve of the Iraq war.
