"If you want to talk like a cowboy, expect the Indians to shoot back."
Time for Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice to shut up and allow Powell to do his job.
Tone down the rhetoric. This is where the Bush administration’s foreign policy experts need to learn from its domestic whiz kids. Karl Rove would never want Bush—or his cabinet—to engage in public name-calling on domestic politics. (He’d get someone else to do it for them.) So why allow Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to pour fuel on the fire in Europe? It’s a repeat of what happened during Schroder’s re-election. Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, accused the Germans of poisoning relations with Washington on the eve of the German election. That only helped Schroder’s vote, by making him look tough and making the White House look heavy-handed. If you want to talk like a cowboy, expect the Indians to shoot back.
Powell tried to avoid that cowboy routine at the Security Council. But he was also frustrated by his opponents’ grandstanding—and the applause they won. When the secretary of State ditched his prepared remarks, he was trying to engage his French and Russian critics head on, his aides said. “Colin Powell knows how to give a speech that gets a lot of applause,” said one senior State department official. “It’s one thing to go the circus and get cotton candy. But now it’s time to bring this one home.”
Bringing a second resolution home is likely to involve a combination of all three of the tactics above. Powell was particularly encouraged by German proposals for a series of substantive tests for the Iraqis to prove yet again whether Iraq is serious about disarming. Those tests—coupled with a re-statement of the previous resolution—could still deliver the U.N. stamp of approval for war in Iraq.
But that depends if the White House wants to give Colin Powell the time and space to build support behind the scenes. If the Bush White House chooses instead to play the Gaullists at their own game, the war of words—and the transatlantic dispute—will only get much, much worse.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
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