Colin Powell - from 'The Guardian':
"--------- On Friday, Bush mobilised 36,000 military reserves, a prelude to a prelude to war. Back in Washington, while he was flying to Manhattan, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution authorising the President to use 'all necessary and appropriate force' not only against terrorists responsible for Tuesday's outrage, but against anyone preparing a future act of terrorism.
The vote - followed by one of 420 to 1 in the lower House - echoed the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964 that empowered Lyndon Johnson to lead America into war in Vietnam. It dovetailed into Bush's pledge on the night of the assault to make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbour them - a warning to Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan, and was a way of putting America, psychologically and militarily, on a war footing.
America's new message to the world is that it is 'time to choose sides'. To Afghanistan and Pakistan in particular, much of the Arab world and other Muslim countries such as Sudan, the premise is that if they are not with America, and do not co-operate with the coming phase, they can count themselves among America's enemies and face the consequences.
But the rift in Bush's administration over the exact next move is only thinly plastered over by this week's events. Bush is stuck between the rock of his impatient, no-mess rhetoric and the hard place of his isolationism. Secretary of State Colin Powell - now cutting a high profile of competence and command - was using different language to describe his approach to 'war of a kind we have not fought before'.
Powell had made it clear the previous day that America should go 'rip up' the network and those who aid it. 'We are at war,' he said, and will 'go after terrorism wherever we find it in the world.' But he added: 'I think we had better be careful as we go forward. The enemy is hidden, the enemy is very often right here at home in the United States. It may be that diplomatic, legal and financial efforts against that kind of enemy could be just as effective as a military campaign.'
Bush and his immediate entourage is unilateralist and isolationist to its core. The President has pulled out of or abrogated five international treaties during as many months in office. Now, in his hour of need, he is riding a demand to fight America's next war, and playing the alliance card in pursuit of doing so.
Closest around Bush, stoking the calls for war, are Vice President Dick Cheney and the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who remained inside the Pentagon during Tuesday's attacks and has now vanished, it is said, into a bunker to plan the war.
But animosity between the Cheney/Rumsfeld axis and Colin Powell dates back to the days of George Bush senior. This will be a war that old soldier Powell will be reluctant to fight unless it is absolutely necessary. Powell is a coalition-builder, and unwilling to act until he knows he has the Nato alliance and moderate Arab states behind him, as he did last time around against Saddam Hussein.
It would be easy for Bush and his team in the White House and Pentagon to muster support for air strikes - maybe with cruise missiles - against Kabul or bin Laden camps on which Indian intelligence is said to have provided information and even - if necessary - some military sanction against Pakistan.
But John McCain, thorn in the side of the administration, called Bush's bluff on Thursday night with the language with which he tormented his predecessor, Bill Clinton, over the Balkans and Rwanda: the notion that there is no middle ground. That Bush's aim of 'removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems and ending the states who sponsor terrorism', means a commitment to all-out war.
'A war,' said McCain, 'that will demand the commitment of American troops and would mean the sacrifice of American blood.' Bush, he argued in effect, cannot have the glory without the body bags. There's no such thing as a free war. Powell, in his way, agrees: the so-called 'Powell doctrine' that kept the US out of Bosnia is an 'all or nothing' approach, demanding clear and attainable goals ---------" |
