THE going of Colin Powell and the coming of Condoleezza Rice will not be the proverbial "changing of the guard" at the US Department of State for the second-term administration of President George W Bush.

A question for us in the Caribbean Community is whether the change will result in any significant improvement in Caribbean-USA relations? - unsatisfactory as it has been under Powell's watch.

Will it be more of the same, or, as is feared, a possible worsening in relations with Rice as the new secretary of state, given her feisty trademark and known unhelpful behind-the-scenes interventions as national security adviser on Western Hemisphere diplomatic appointments and also US-Caricom tension pertaining to Haiti's governance crisis?

There would be understandable uneasiness among Caricom governments in having to deal with a reputed "warrior princess" and "extremely close confidant" to Bush.

Since he is not planning, as already signalled, any "kiss-and-tell" book on his four years as secretary of state, we may never know for sure the exact nature and extent of the problems with which Powell had to cope in serving as "America's face to the world" - so described by the president himself.

What is generally recognised, in and out of America, is that Powell, the first-ever African-American of Caribbean roots to have been appointed US secretary of state, was very much the sole moderate in a Bush Administration whose positions on sensitive and complex world issues, including the Iraq war, were often at odds with the best known team of ideological hawks in Washington - Rice among them.

From a Caribbean perspective, there is really nothing of much significance to distinguish Powell's term at the State Department during which he paid comparatively limited attention to our region, or the western hemisphere as whole.

We know how intensely involved he became with post-9/11 challenges, the Iraq war - about which he was so badly misled, as admitted - and to keep up with his president's disturbing preference for unilateralist politics rather than multilateral approaches.

For us in the Caribbean Community, the lingering disappointment would be the result of our own misplaced expectations from this offspring of Jamaican parentage on his assumed concern to tackle some of the fundamental social and economic problems that continue to plague the Latin America-Caribbean region.

It would be a magnanimous gesture on the part of our Caribbean Community to forgive him, for instance, for his shocking somersault on Caricom's original "peace" initiative on Haiti back in February this year, while Jean-Bertrand Aristide was still the elected head of state.

Powell had made pellucid, following interventions that included the Organisation of American States (OAS) and subsequently a delegation comprising Caricom and Canadian representatives, that "we (USA) will accept no outcome that in any way illegally attempts to remove the elected president of Haiti..."

Shortly after, however, Powell was to be humiliated when the Bush White House, influenced by the hawks who delight in "regime change" by force, speedily manoeuvred for a military option to move into Haiti in the wee hours of February 29 and forced Aristide out of power - a development well synchronised with armed and foreign-backed anti-Aristide rebels.

Nor did Powell endear himself to Caribbean administrations and institutions by failing to produce any new thinking for the peaceful removal, by dialogue, of that old bone stuck in the throat of successive US administrations for the past 42 years - Cuba.

Instead, he was to be misled, and subsequently embarrassed, first by the short-lived appointment he favoured of the rabid anti-Castro Cuban émigré, Otto Reich, as head of the State Department's Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. And, subsequently, the appointment of another ideological hard-liner, Roger Noriega, as Reich's successor.

Incidentally, what both Reich and Noriega shared was the quiet but effective support of Bush and his national security adviser who, as the new secretary of state, may ironically make Caricom realise how "safer" it was doing business with Powell, despite all the disappointments experienced during his term.

What little interaction there have been between Powell and Caricom did not result in any known benefit of significance for the Caribbean. His legacy seems destined to be recalled for what it failed to accomplish.

Yet, overall, I think Caricom would be kind when officially extending best wishes to Powell as he moves out of the Bush Administration to a life in the lucrative private sector.
Or, quite possibly to head the World Bank. Current Caricom chairman, Prime Minister Keith Mitchell, has already remarked that Powell's resignation is "a loss for our region".

This assumed "loss" may have to be officially explained.
For Larry Birns, director of the Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) that regularly monitors political, economic and diplomatic issues affecting the Western Hemisphere, Powell's resignation "will have little impact on Latin America other than to confirm that under his watch US-Latin American relations reached their lowest level in years..."

So far as Rice is concerned, the COHA director said that she would best be remembered in this hemisphere for her "praise for hard-right ideologue Otto Reich" and for her reported denouncement of the decision by the Jamaican Government of Prime Minister P J Patterson to offer temporary refuge to the deposed Haitian president, Aristide.

In writing last week on the "disengagement" of Colin Powell, the BBC's world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds said that his weakness was that "he lacked the vision of the world held by his rivals..."

"He, too, believed in US power and influence, but where others saw certainty, he saw complexity. This slowed him down and gave the others the edge. And, in the end, he lacked the ear of the president, without which a secretary of state is powerless..."

Well, from all reports, Condoleezza Rice's primary qualification for replacing Powell is the influence she can wield in having much more than the "ear" of President Bush. Will it work to the advantage of Caricom and the Greater Caribbean, including Cuba and Venezuela? We shall see.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World