It is shocking that in the hundreds of cables released in recent days, U.S. diplomats often repeat unverified rumors. If I tried to base a story on such information, my editors would routinely send it back to me with an admonition: "Get some better sources. Find someone to speak on the record. Verify some of this stuff."

So now the State Department is rushing to mollify foreign leaders in Italy, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. This idle and unsubstantiated rumor-mongering by U.S. diplomats has shattered the brittle façade of official smiles we have dubbed "Public Diplomacy" -- a euphemism for public affairs that some also call "propaganda."

Propaganda is meant to persuade the public that black is white. Public affairs tells the public about the good things our government does while simply ignoring the bad things we sometimes do. Public diplomacy is a hybrid of the two -- explaining policies to foreign audiences with the hope of changing minds.

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Bush's reversal comes under immense domestic and international pressure for the United States to take a more active role. Just two days earlier, on ABC's "Good Morning America" Tuesday, Powell had said he would not go to the region until the fighting died down.

But Powell is now going without any new plan to reconcile Palestinians and Israelis. When one senior administration official was asked whether Powell had a new plan with him, the official said only that the secretary brings "the vision that we had put forward previously."

That Bush administration "vision" includes months of fruitless appeals to Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat to "do more" to rein in terrorists, and for both sides to negotiate a series of failed peace plans known as Tenet and Mitchell, as well as carrying out U.N. resolutions 242 and 338 going back decades.

"The president wanted to review that, to remind everybody of that vision, and to reinforce that vision as the way forward," the official said.

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Thousands of Afghans are already enclosed in camps at Spin Boldak on the Afghan side of the border between Quetta, Pakistan and Kandahar, Afghanistan -- an area that's the last redoubt of the Taliban regime of Mullah Omar. The camps are controlled by the Taliban; refugees are surrounded by armed Taliban guards, who allow armed Afghans into the camps if they are loyal to the Taliban. Food and tents sent by international humanitarian agencies are being distributed by Saudi relief groups, who may be the only nationality operating there -- the U.N. has no control over the camps and is afraid to distribute food because of threats of violence.

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Since Sept. 11, few U.S. allies have come in for as much criticism as Saudi Arabia. U.S.-Saudi relations have been strained by revelations that 15 of 19 hijackers were disaffected Saudis, that some of the kingdom's wealthiest citizens fund bin Laden's al-Qaida and that the country's rulers have refused to cooperate in shutting down the vast network of banks and businesses that fund bin Laden's worldwide terror crusade.

Republican Sen. John McCain, for instance, blasted the Saudis on CNN's "Late Edition" on Oct. 28, charging that the monarchy isn't doing "what the president asked all countries to do, and that is to take sides" in the war on terrorism.

But earlier that same week, President Bush called Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz "to thank the kingdom for its support in the international war against terrorism," spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Oct. 25. Bush reassured the Saudi leader that "press articles citing differences between the United States and Saudi Arabia are simply incorrect," Fleischer said.

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Powell was ridiculed as the missing man by Time magazine in its Sept. 10 issue -- the day before the terrorist attacks that killed as many as 7,000 and transformed international affairs. "Where have you gone Colin Powell?" read the taunt on the cover. The article called Powell the "odd man out," and said that a slew of conservatives -- from Richard Perle to Paul Wolfowitz in the Defense Department, to John Bolton at State -- had neutralized the liberal, diplomacy-oriented secretary of state.

It's tempting to ask where those hawkish voices have gone, now that Powell has become the reassuring, firm voice of reason to a frightened, angry nation.

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The trend -- which began under President Clinton -- ends decades of virtual neutrality in the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan. The new strategy relies on courting India to help contain China.

It certainly became easier for the United States to take sides after the military coup in Pakistan in 1999. India, a democracy since 1947, does seem a more natural U.S. ally than Pakistan. But India often sided with the Soviet Union in the United Nations during the Cold War, and bought Soviet-bloc weapons. And Pakistan's long series of military rulers provided a staunch U.S. ally during the Cold War.

The U-2 spy plane of Francis Gary Powers, shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, took off from a Pakistani airfield. When President Nixon and Henry Kissinger broke the ice and visited Mao Zedong in 1972, Pakistan paved the way. And when the United States gave $500 million a year in arms and supplies, including Stinger missiles, to help Afghan mujahideen guerrillas defeat the Russian army in the 1980s, the rebels were based in Pakistan.

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As the first African-American secretary of state, Powell has been accorded near-messianic treatment in Africa. And perhaps because he is black, there was a profound resonance to Powell's harsh criticism of the doddering strongmen ruling Zimbabwe, Kenya, Gabon, Togo and other countries, and his call for democracy and governments that are accountable to their people.

On the plane from Washington to Mali, Powell admitted to reporters that he felt an "emotional twinge" in returning to Africa. He had visited several years prior to being named secretary of state. "Obviously I'm moved by the fact that I'm the first African-American secretary of state to visit Africa," he said. He reminded reporters that his job was to represent the Bush administration and "show we have an interest in Africa."

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Before the talks can resume, Powell suggested, Israelis must commit to a total freeze on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza -- a call that has already been rejected by the hawkish allies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Even dovish Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres has been critical of abandoning settlement construction. During a recent Washington visit, Peres stated that with 200,000 settlers, the "normal growth" needs of expanding families will require construction of new homes. On Monday, Powell took his strongest stand yet against the Israeli settlements -- long a thorn in the relationship between Israel and previous U.S. administrations going back 20 years -- ruling out even what Israel calls "normal growth."

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On his first day in President Bush's new administration, Boucher had to shift 180 degrees from the Clinton policy he and others had worked on for eight years to help hundreds of millions of people seeking to control their family size. Now Boucher had to defend the Reagan-era Mexico City rules on family planning, newly restored by Bush, which bar U.S. aid to overseas organizations that discuss or counsel on abortion with their clients, or lobby to remove bans on abortion.

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The statement put the U.S. back into an all too familiar role: that of a stern parent dealing with feuding siblings. Powell blamed the Arabs for the flare-up of violence, saying "The hostilities last night in Gaza were precipitated by the provocative Palestinian mortar attacks on Israel," but also had harsh words for Israel. "There can be no military solution to this conflict," said Powell pointedly. The remarks were carefully designed to admonish both parties without alienating either, but the brunt of disapproval clearly fell on Israel.

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Just last month, 50 Russian diplomats were expelled from Washington for spying. Fifty U.S. diplomats got the boot in return by Moscow's president Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy master. Days earlier, Bush administration officials called North Korea's bizarre Stalinist leader Kim Jong-il nasty names and threatened to break a 1994 nuclear pact with that country.

Nor has George W. Bush spared his allies, pushing them to swallow the National Missile Defense system which Europe detests as unnecessary, expensive and destabilizing. And less than a week ago, Europe was shocked by Bush's withdrawing the U.S. from negotiations over the Kyoto protocol on climate change -- a move that had little to do with defense policy, of course, but one that foreign leaders have widely perceived as a throwback to a unilateral, Cold War superpower approach to global problems.

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The two organizations said they will meet in Norway next month with experts and advocates to figure out how to deliver the drugs to people who are dying by the thousands each week. Under the proposed plan, the WTO would work to negotiate patent laws with drug companies and member nations, while the WHO would raise money to pay for production of the drugs and would administer their distribution.

The announcement marks an unprecedented response from drug companies to humanitarian pleas that millions of people not be left to die while life-prolonging medicines sit bottled up on pharmacy shelves. Approximately 70 percent of the world's AIDS cases are in Africa. The WHO estimates that 25 million Africans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Currently only 10,000 of them are receiving drug treatment to stem the progression of the disease.

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Powell has long set off fears among Republicans that the son of black, Jamaican immigrants is really too liberal for the Grand Ol' Party. So when the new secretary of state shuttled from Egypt to Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria last week, promising to allow Iraq greater access to consumer goods, it seemed to confirm their worst fears.

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That's all it took to abandon promises to keep the Middle East's intractable Arab-Israeli dispute at arm's length. Like President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright before them, Bush and Powell now burn up the phone lines to Israeli and Palestinian leaders, to the kings and presidents of the Middle East. They call for calm, for negotiations, for low oil prices, for an end to incitement and violence and for solidarity against Saddam Hussein. Plus ça change.

Powell's solo trip overseas begins Feb. 23. He goes to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Syria and then to Kuwait for the 10th anniversary of his victory over Iraq as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The new administration is already learning that you can defeat an army, you can summon peace conferences and you can even get signatures on treaties, but pinning down peace in the Middle East is like mapping the shifting desert's dunes.

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From the universities to the bazaars to the upscale city neighborhoods to a drought-stricken village south of Tehran, signs of the losing battle for reform are ever present.

In upscale north Tehran last summer, young men and their girlfriends walked along the streets holding hands -- a display of affection that could have cost them a beating and time in jail a few years ago. A very few women dared walk the five yards from their front door to their cars without a headscarf. And while headscarves, or the more conservative head-to-toe black chador, are still required by law outside the home, increasingly women let some of their hair escape, wear colorful scarves and don short manteau coats, allowing their bare feet in dainty slippers to be seen -- often with bright nail polish.

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