Prominent conservatives urge replacement for Rice

This article is a strange one. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda.

The conservatives, who include Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle and leading current and former members of the Pentagon and National Security Council, have urged the president to transfer Miss Rice out of the State Department and to an advisory role. They said Miss Rice, stemming from her lack of understanding of the Middle East, has misled the president on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

So far, so good. She's shown pretty clearly that she's ineffectual at best and incompetent at worst. The strange part is the nature of the charges against her. Although Rice 's sole "virtue" is that she shows blind loyalty to the Bush-Cheney agenda, she's accused of being too much her own person in crafting policy. It makes no sense, I know, but it all becomes clear later in the article:

Several of the critics have urged that Mr. Bush provide a high-profile post to James Baker, who was secretary of state under the administration of Mr. Bush's father. They cited Mr. Baker's determination to confront Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein in 1990.

A leading public critic of Miss Rice has been Richard Perle, a former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and regarded as close to Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Perle, pointing to the effort by the State Department to undermine the Reagan administration’s policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, has accused Miss Rice of succumbing to a long-time State Department agenda of meaningless agreements meant to appease enemies of the United States.

There you have it-- it's the neocons, they want war, and they see her as a useful fall guy.