Most Eastern and Southern European countries strongly supported Bushes policy in Iraq. The rift with Europe is more of simply a rift with France, Russia, and Germany. Its not Powells fault that these countries did not want to do what was necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq after 12 years of failure in that regard.
Arun,
"Yeah but deep....I'm sick of the "respect" colin powell seems to have when in fact he may be one of the most incompetant secretary of states we've ever had. His speech to the UN was a repetition of every thing george W had said with absolutely no new material."
Powell is doing a great job under very difficult circumstances. Under him, US foreign Policy has ended the threat of Saddam and stopped Aghanistan from being the central base for international terrorism. How many before him in his position can claim to have done similar things?
Rather than fixing the North Korean problem, Mr. Clinton simply put a bandaid on it. North Korea is a difficult problem with few cost effective solutions. It was under Powell that we discovered that North Korea had never honored its commitments to the Clinton administration with a secret Nuclear Weapons program outside of the one we thought we had stopped with the negotiation.
In Pakistan, the USA's cooperation with Pakistan has yielded some of the greatest successes in catching and killing members of Al Quada. The USA has also helped prevent war from happening between India in Pakistan in the build up during the summer of 2001.
Colin Powell has done an excellent job and is one of the big reasons I'll be voting for Bush in 2004. The national security team Bush has in his cabinet is probably the best this country has ever had in its history.
