By Steve Schifferes BBC News Online, Washington

Powell: Under fire from the right

The former speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, has launched a wide-ranging attack on the failure of the state department to promote US interests abroad.

His remarks represent the opening salvo in a campaign by neo-conservatives to transform the state department in the image of the defence department under Donald Rumsfeld.

The people the state department has sent to Iraq... were promoted in a culture of propping up dictators, coddling the corrupt, and ignoring the secret police Former Republican speaker Newt Gingrich

The disagreements over strategy within the Bush administration seemed to have intensified with the end of the war, with conflicts over the approach to Syria, Iran, and North Korea as well as in how to rebuild Iraq.

And the right, made bold by its victory in Baghdad, seems to be winning more of the arguments.

Politeness and accommodation

According to Mr Gingrich, the culture of the state department represents "process, politeness, and accommodation" as opposed to the president's approach of "facts, values and outcomes".

Newt: State department is 'ineffective and incoherent'

It was the state department which undermined the US position at the UN by accepting inspections, and agreeing to Hans Blix as chief inspector, he argues.

And it was the "ineffective and incoherent" state department that lost the battle for world public opinion, and despite a "pathetic public campaign of hand wringing and desperation" it failed to gain a majority on the security council for a second resolution.

"It was a stunning diplomatic defeat of the first order," he said.

Post-war reconstruction

The political and economic rebuilding of Iraq has continued to be the central battleground between the state and defence departments.

The state department has cautioned against giving too much power to Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile favoured by the Pentagon.

And the state department has fought a fierce rearguard action in Congress to ensure that it, rather than the Pentagon, would control the funds for reconstruction.

But Mr Gingrich says that the state department aid arm, the Agency for International Development (AID), is useless and should be abolished.

He advocates giving the Army Corps of Engineers the job of rebuilding Iraq, and says that in Afghanistan, where AID held sway, "not a single mile of road has been paved in two years".

And he says state department people on the reconstruction team "have a constituency of Middle East governments deeply opposed to democracy" and were promoted in a culture "of propping up dictators, coddling the corrupt, and ignoring the secret police".

New disputes

There are also serious disagreements between the state department and the Pentagon on how to deal with the emerging crises in Syria, Iran, Palestine and North Korea.

Mr Gingrich said that Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, should not be travelling to Syria while they "openly host" seven terrorist organisations and when the "US military has created the opportunity to apply genuine economic, diplomatic and political pressure".

It has been Donald Rumsfeld who repeatedly warned Syria about harbouring members of the former Iraqi government.

And earlier, the Pentagon moved stealth bombers closer to North Korea even as Colin Powell was flying to China to try and organise multilateral talks to defuse the crisis.

More recently, according to the Washington Post, Mr Rumsfeld tried to replace James Kelly as the US negotiator in the forthcoming North Korea-China-US talks, with hardliner John Bolton.

Mid-East peace process

Mr Gingrich also attacked the state department plan for peace in the Middle East, the so-called "roadmap" that will be put forward by the "quartet" - the United States, the European Union, the UN and Russia.

He said that this was "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president's policies" and that it was unimaginable after the bitter lessons of the last five months that the US "would voluntarily accept a system in which the UN, the EU and Russia could routinely outvote President Bush's positions by three to one."

Despite the criticism, Mr Gingrich says he is not attacking Mr Powell personally.

And President Bush's press secretary Ari Fleischer defended Mr Powell, saying that he "did a excellent job at ushering through that (diplomatic) process" at the UN and had the president's backing for his trip to Syria.

But with Mr Rumsfeld, strengthened by his high-profile role in the military campaign, Mr Powell may find his position in Washington has been weakened by the war.