April may have been one of Rice's cruelest months

WASHINGTON, May 1 (Reuters) For US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, April may have been one of the cruelest months.

There is little good news on US foreign policy from Iraq and Afghanistan to North Korea and Russia.

On the domestic front, Rice has been subpoenaed to testify about erroneous intelligence used to justify the Iraq war, has fended off criticism from former CIA Director George Tenet and has watched one of her top aides resign amid a sex scandal.

Few analysts could cite recent diplomatic victories for the administration; all said challenges abound.

Violence rages in Iraq and the US-backed government there has yet to forge the political compromises that many analysts believe are mandatory to end the strife.

In Afghanistan, US and NATO forces face a revived Taliban insurgency more than five years after U.S.-led troops toppled the Taliban regime that harbored al Qaeda.

Analysts said the US commitments in both countries, as well as the complexity of the problems they face and the heavy US resources they demand, are constraining US foreign policy elsewhere.

''Quite clearly the fact that we have most of our forces tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan is not lost on the rest of the world,'' said Daniel Serwer of of the US Institute for Peace think tank. ''When Gulliver is tied down, everybody knows it.'' ''You've got some long-term trends, like the war in Iraq and the (Republican) loss of Congress, which are narrowing the options and the chickens are coming home to roost,'' said Rand Corporation analyst James Dobbins.

One area where the State Department claimed success just a few months ago was North Korea, following its Feb. 13 agreement to take steps to give up its nuclear programs in exchange for the prospect of economic and other benefits.

However, Pyongyang missed one of the deal's first deadlines on April 14 by failing to shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon because of a financial dispute.

'WEAK HAND' Last week alone, Rice suffered several setbacks.

On Wednesday, a congressional committee subpoenaed her to testify about the 2003 White House claim -- since discredited -- that Iraq sought to acquire uranium from Niger.

On Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans to freeze Moscow's commitments under a European arms control deal, a move that increased tensions.

On Friday, Rice accepted the abrupt resignation of Randall Tobias, a U.S. deputy secretary of state in charge of foreign aid, after he told ABC News he had called an escort service ''to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.'' Tobias, 65, said there had been no sex, ABC reported.

On Sunday, Rice spent much of her morning on television talk shows responding to Tenet's claim in his new memoir that ''there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.'' State Department spokesman Sean McCormack rejected the idea that it had been an exceptionally difficult week.

''In this business, I have lived through some really bad weeks.

The week of Sept. 11 -- that was a bad week,'' McCormack said.

''Last week -- this is what happens in the conduct of foreign policy. It's what happens in Washington.'' Carlos Pascual, the director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, gave credit to the administration for maintaining coalitions to deal with North Korea and Iran, which Washington also accuses of developing nuclear weapons.

''When you deal with rogue actors like North Korea you can't expect them to do what they say they will do. You have to build in the resilience to come back at them,'' Pascual said.

''It's too early to draw conclusions that the North Korea policy is a failure ... or that she'll never get anywhere on the Middle East, or that the Iran opening is a charade,'' said Dobbins. ''I wouldn't be drawing judgments except that, given the weak hand she is playing, the odds for success are long.'' REUTERS RJ ND1052