Or at least they didn't like him much...
http://www.nowpublic.com/aei_having_trouble_with_the_administrationRice also appointed Nicholas Burns her undersecretary of state
for Policy, the same position promised him by the Kerry administration. After
Robert B. Zoellick stepped down as deputy secretary of state on July 7, 2006,
Rice sought to promote Burns, but the White House personal office vetoed his
nomination.
Active Appeasement
Our Iran Policy
By Michael A. Ledeen
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.24989/pub_detail.aspIt looks more and more to me that David Frum’s sensitive political nose was right, that the Bush administration is looking for an exit strategy, and that the strategy requires only a bit of verbal cooperation from the friendly mullahs in Tehran. If they will promise to behave, and “work with us to guarantee security” in Iraq, we will get out of their way, abandon the Iraqis to their doom, and leave the life-and-death question of how to deal with Iran to the next administration.
There does not seem to be any forceful effective opposition to this course within the administration. Baker is no fool; he would not be making such statements to the Times unless he were confident of consensus. And indeed, in the London Telegraph we see that our brave democracy advocates in the State Department have been trying to set up the mechanism for our surrender:
The Bush administration made secret overtures to former Iran president Mohammed Khatami during his visit to the United States last month in an attempt to establish a back channel via the ex-leader.
American officials made the approach as part of a strategy to isolate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr Khatami's hard-line successor, by using the former president as a conduit to the Iranian people.
They also hoped that Mr Khatami would report his conversations to senior members of Iran's theocratic regime who are wary of the current president. Diplomatic sources said that “third parties” were authorised by Nicholas Burns, the US under-secretary of state responsible for relations with Iran, to talk to Mr Khatami in a step towards “engagement” with senior Iranians.
This needs a bit of deconstruction. The most important sentence is the last. It tells us that the secretary of State (Burns, like Baker, is no fool; he would not authorize talks with the mullahs without Condoleezza Rice’s say-so) has approved (still more) talks with the mullahs. Notice also that there is no reference to the celebrated nuclear question. This is all about “engagement,” which is a baby step this side of “normalization.”
Perhaps Burns has been "turned"??