Washington Post reports that after the "French cut him off at the knees", Powell moved solidly into the hawk camp:
Moderate Powell Turns Hawkish On War With Iraq
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 24, 2003; Page A01
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, long perceived as the Bush administration's most prominent moderate on Iraq, has turned hawkish in the past week.
Powell's shift, apparent in public statements and in private conversations with his aides, stems from his dismay at the French decision to publicly oppose military action and President Bush's growing belief that neither inspectors nor Saddam Hussein appear capable of disarming Iraq.
Within the administration, Powell was the leading advocate for bringing the issue to the United Nations to build an international consensus and test Hussein's willingness to reach a peaceful resolution. But he has told aides in recent days that he would support military action even without a formal U.N. resolution.
The result is that the once-bitter debates over Iraq among Bush's senior foreign policy advisers have melded "into a pretty solid consensus now, more so than any other issue," a senior State Department official said. "The president is ironclad in his determination that this particular regime will be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction," and he has lost patience with both the U.N. weapons inspectors and Hussein.
Powell, a retired four-star general, has long kept up a careful balancing act on Iraq. Reflecting his years of experience in the military and in Washington, he has argued strenuously in internal debates that Washington must be seen as going the extra mile to avoid war. But he has also saluted smartly whenever the president resolves the debate and makes a decision, which is why he has managed to preserve his influence in an administration stocked with forceful advocates for confronting Iraq.
Powell may feel "we're going down this road and he wants to keep steering this train," said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a Powell friend and onetime unpaid State Department Middle East envoy. "The way to do that is not to be off to one side, but to be out front."
It is in the interest of the administration, when it is under assault from such important allies as France, to present a picture of unity within the administration, and rarely is the full picture of the administration's internal debates clear to outsiders; also, it may be in the administration's interest to make Iraq believe that war is imminent.
But Powell signals his intentions very clearly in his public statements, and a striking shift in his thinking has become apparent this month.
In an interview in his State Department offices two weeks ago, Powell suggested that the inspections regime was in its infancy. "The inspectors are really now starting to gain momentum," in part because the United States had just begun providing intelligence, he said. He noted that a report from U.N. weapons inspectors due next Monday was not a final document, but only "the first formal, official report."
But this week, Powell flatly said: "The question isn't how much longer do you need for inspections to work. Inspections will not work."
In the interview two weeks ago, Powell proudly noted the "defining conversation" he had with Bush on Aug. 5, when he urged the president to make an effort to win U.N. support for a confrontation with Iraq. "He always had in his mind that it was preferable to multilateralize this," Powell said.
Yesterday, with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at his side, Powell said it was "an open question right now" whether the United States would even seek a U.N. resolution authorizing military force. He said the administration believes it has sufficient authority under earlier resolutions, adding that even without U.N. backing, "I'm quite confident if it comes to that we'll be joined by many nations."
Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Powell's assertion that inspections will not work was "a dramatic change."
She said the remarks "are the closest thing I have seen over all these months to the administration giving up on inspections." Vice President Cheney was skeptical of inspections in a speech in August, but since then, U.S. officials have emphasized that Iraq could be disarmed through rigorous inspections. "If we are now walking away from that policy, that is very significant," she said.
State Department officials said the environment has changed dramatically this month. Hussein, in Powell's eyes, has repeatedly passed up opportunities to demonstrate that the Iraqi regime will cooperate with the inspections, by taking such actions as thwarting overflights and making it difficult to have productive interviews with scientists. "Hussein has not warmed up to the [inspection] process for 12 years," one official said. "It's pie in the sky to think he'll have a change of heart now."
Even more crucial, officials said, was France's decision Monday to openly break with the United States a week before the inspection report was delivered.
France, in its role as chairman of the U.N. Security Council this month, had called a ministerial meeting on terrorism. U.S. officials had anticipated some discussion of Iraq at the meeting, but they were blindsided when French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin used a news conference afterward to threaten to veto any imminent military action. Since then, France has enlisted Germany -- next month's Security Council chair -- in an alliance against a U.S. military strike.
Powell has had some difficult discussions with Villepin since then, aides said, and he has concluded that the French and Germans will continue to put up obstacles to a resolution, making it almost fruitless to continue with inspections in the hopes of winning approval for military action at a later date. Officials think the French and Germans are determined to string out the process as long as possible, largely because of domestic political considerations, and so they will always come up with a excuse to avoiding ending the inspections.
"What they said is we should let this process continue," Powell said earlier this week. "But it's not clear to me how long they want it to continue or whether they're serious about bringing it to a conclusion at some time."
Patrick Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that in early December Powell had won an administration battle over whether to wait until the Jan. 27 inspectors' report before making the case for military action. Powell counseled others the United States must not be perceived as rushing to judgment.
Now that the French have jumped the gun, Clawson said, "they cut him off at the knees. It must have been terribly discouraging to him."
washingtonpost.com |
