Hi all; Powell gloats in victory over pro-Israeli hawks:
Stepping into the Fray
Newsweek, week of June 16, 2003k
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Powell was perhaps the happiest of all. The secretary, so often isolated in Washington, said he had backed the president’s decision to give Rice a key role in overseeing negotiations. (A senior official said that “from time to time” Rice would travel to the region as “the president’s personal representative.”) Powell spoke frankly of a new alliance between State and the White House, one solid enough to dissuade pro-Israel hawks in the vice president’s office and Defense Department from undermining the peace effort. “There is no daylight between us,” Powell told NEWSWEEK Friday at a bittersweet farewell party for one of his chief allies, State policy-planning chief Richard Haass. “The president wanted it that way.” The secretary said administration moderates like William Burns, the assistant secretary of State for the Mideast, and longtime hawks like Elliott Abrams of Rice’s National Security Council were now working together “like that”—and he linked his two index fingers. (Powell may not be blowing smoke: disappointed neoconservative hawks in Washington, who oppose any attempt to force concessions from Israel, have begun to question whether Abrams has “gone over to the other side,” as one official put it.) Asked if this was a response to his failed peace mission in April 2002, when the hard-liners undercut him by winking at Sharon’s incursions into Palestinian territory, Powell nodded, then grimaced. “We were not going to have that again,” he said.
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msnbc.com
-- Carl |
