The more delirious the rhetoric, the more hollow the policy.

That line's a lift from this Sidney Blumenthal article in today's Guardian. I don't know what to make of this Blumenthal chap. He's a former adviser to Bill Clinton. In this article he seems to be reducing America's foreign policy adventures to the aspirations, prejudices and the relationship of two people, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

As national security adviser, before 9/11, Rice protected Bush from warnings by the counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, about al-Qaida attacks - and demoted Clarke. Before the invasion of Iraq, she lent her imprimatur to the disinformation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and peddled it to the media. She did not demand an Iraq postwar stabilisation plan. Nor did she object to the Pentagon's seizure of Iraq's civil governance responsibilities from the state department. Before Israel's attack on Lebanon, she did not caution against the possibility of Israeli failure against Hizbullah. She was party to the decision to lend full war materiel and intelligence support to the effort if Israel would undertake it.

In the beginning, the didactic academic lectured her pupil that he stood at a crossroads like in 1947, at the making of the cold-war policy. After 9/11, she inculcated in Bush the notion that he was a world-builder and could imprint his design on a scale to match the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that established the sovereignty of nation-states.

A few months after Rice became secretary of state, in July 2005, she transported senior staff to a West Virginia retreat where her head of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, delivered a lecture on the Peace of Westphalia followed by one on the Truman Doctrine to explain the magnitude of Rice - and Bush's - ambition for "transformational diplomacy".

This May, as the situation in Iraq drastically worsened, Rice told senior staff that she wants no more reporting from the embassies. She announced in a meeting that people write memos only for each other, and that no one else reads them. She said she wouldn't read them. Instead of writing reports, the diplomats should "sell America", she insisted. "We are salesmen for America!"

She sounds like Marie Antoinette to George Bush's Louis XVI. Could that really be how America works?