I said when I posted the first of Woodward's pieces on his new book that it sounded like "Powell saves the World." NRO Agrees.
NOV. 18, 2002: DISSING THE ALAMO
By David Frum
Powell Disses the Alamo:
Colin Powell should have been fired yesterday, literally. The Washington Post yesterday posted its first excerpt from Bob Woodward"s new book, Bush at War. Like Woodward's book on the Gulf War, The Generals, Bush at War is essentially an edited transcript of Powell leaks, all of them calculated to injure this administration and undermine its policies on the very eve of military action against Iraq.
For more than a year, we've been reading nasty little stories in the papers about Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld and condescending stories about President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. Careful readers have understood that these stories emanated from the State Department, but until now, Powell has taken care to protect his personal deniability. Now he has abandoned that polite pretense.
In the Woodward piece, Powell scorns the president for his "Texas, Alamo macho." (I guess Powell thinks Col. Travis should have negotiated.) Powell complains with Senate Democrats that acting against Iraq "would suck the oxygen" out of the anti-terror campaign. He denigrates Rice, snidely observing that "she had had difficulties" keeping up with what Bush was doing. When the president over-rules him, Powell complains that he thought he had a "deal", as if cabinet members bargain with their president rather than taking orders from him. Powell repeatedly praises himself or repeats the praise of others: We learn from him about a personal call from Rice in which she compliments one of his presentations as "terrific," and we hear via Woodward that Powell is "smooth, upbeat ... eloquent." Amazingly, Powell even manages to insert into this long uncontrolled soliloquy of accusation against his colleagues a complaint that they sometimes leak against him!
"[Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage] had heard from reliable media contacts that a barrage was being unloaded on Powell. ... The White House was going to trim Powell's sails; he was going to fail. Armitage said he couldn't verify who was leaking this, but he had names of senior people in Defense and in Cheney's office. "That's unbelievable!" Powell said.
There is no sin in a cabinet officer dissenting from the policies of his president. Nor is it necessarily wrong for him to take his dissent to the country. But before he makes his dissent public, he should resign, and if he won't resign, he should be sacked. Instead of representing the United States to the world, Powell sees his job as representing the world to the United States. It's time for him to go.
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