Tomorrow, and Powell's UN "talk" are approaching quickly....Maybe this article of a few months ago will provide some insight for tomorrow....
The Left and Right Have The Secretary All Wrong
washingtonpost.com
By James Mann
Sunday, September 1, 2002; Page B01
Over the past few months, as the Bush administration has begun to contemplate military intervention in Iraq, one question has quietly circulated and recirculated in the overheated Washington summer air: Why doesn't Secretary of State Colin Powell quit?
Powell, the nation's most prominent advocate of caution in the application of military force, has been the subject of rumors, whispers, editorials and talk shows. Liberals increasingly yearn for his resignation in some display of principled outrage. A New York Times editorial in July beseeched him to "stand his ground" and "throw a tantrum or two." Conservatives, meanwhile, call on Powell to get on the team or else to (guess what?) resign. Powell should "[figure] out how best to execute the president's policy -- or he could step aside and let someone else do the job," wrote William Kristol in last week's Weekly Standard.
The odd thing about all this resignation talk is that virtually all the parties and factions involved have been making faulty assumptions, both about Powell himself and about the political realities and dynamics of the Bush administration.
The liberals delude themselves into believing that Powell is one of them. He's not. The conservatives delude themselves into thinking that they and the Bush administration don't need Powell. They do. And over the past year, Powell's defenders have sometimes seemed to delude themselves into believing that he has been winning many of the foreign-policy debates within the Bush administration. So far, at least, that's been more evident to them than to others.
The liberals, desperate to believe that they have some voice or foothold within the Bush administration, seem to have the misconception that Powell thinks like them. But consider his own description of his unhappiness in 1993, when he served his final months as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first months of the Clinton administration. "Although I was a member of the team, I still felt a little like a skunk at the picnic," he wrote in his autobiography. "I had been up to my eyeballs in Reagan and Bush national security policies that were held in some disrepute by my new bosses."
Powell has been, throughout his career, a proponent of a strong national defense, an extensive military presence overseas and, more generally, a unique American role in the world. He supported the Star Wars program in the 1980s and resisted relaxing the ban on gays in the military in the 1990s. His spectacular military career took him steadily from officers training at City College of New York to four-star general. Yet as he readily acknowledges, most of the key steps in his separate, parallel rise through Washington's foreign policy establishment were in Republican administrations. He was introduced to future Republican leaders as a White House fellow under Richard Nixon, became national security adviser under Reagan and was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs under George H.W. Bush.
Powell served comfortably as the loyal military aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, the most hawkish Cabinet member of that Reagan administration and the architect of unprecedented increases in the defense budget. "To Weinberger and Reagan we owe the resurgence of the United States as a respected and credible military power," Powell later wrote. (What eventually became the "Powell doctrine" for caution in the use of force is an updated version of what was then called the Weinberger doctrine: U.S. troops should be sent into conflict only when vital U.S. interests are at stake, where there is strong public support, where the objectives are clearly defined and limited, and where overwhelming force is used to accomplish the objective.) After his military retirement, Powell turned down offers to become Clinton's secretary of state, primarily because he felt more in tune with the Republicans than with the Democrats on foreign policy.
Certainly, Powell behaves like a liberal on domestic social issues, such as affirmative action and gun control (on both matters, he has been more forthright in his support than many Democratic politicians). And since the mid-1990s, Powell's skepticism about military intervention -- especially his reluctance to commit U.S. troops to the Balkans -- has made him the bane of the neoconservatives, who favor a more assertive American role in promoting democracy and human rights.
Yet over the years, the right wing has displayed some ambivalence about Powell. Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official whose staunch pro-defense views put him at the far right of the political spectrum, recalls ruefully what happened when he agreed to argue against Powell's presidential candidacy on a 1995 television talk show about Powell's record on defense and foreign policy issues. Gaffney forgot to ask who would be on the pro-Powell side of the debate. When he arrived at the studio the next morning, he discovered his mentor, former boss and fellow hawk Richard Perle, glowering at him; Perle was there to defend Powell's record on national security.
On Iraq, Powell's position appears to fall well short of what the liberals believe. His supporters maintain that the ongoing debates within the administration are not over the need for military action to replace Saddam Hussein, on which all sides are said to agree, but over how and when to intervene, with what allies and with what plans for an aftermath. This formulation may be a delaying tactic, and it certainly leaves plenty of room for serious, indeed intense, disagreements among different sorts of conservatives. But it is hardly the liberal position against intervention.
Where the liberals misinterpret Powell's views, the right wing underestimates his political importance to the administration. On one Fox News show this summer, Kristol put it this way: "If Colin Powell resigned tomorrow and said, 'I have some disagreements with this administration. . . .' there'd be two days of clucking. The president would nominate Condi Rice to be secretary of state on Wednesday. She'd be confirmed three weeks later. And it wouldn't make one percentage point of difference in President Bush's approval ratings."
That's wishful thinking. A Powell resignation would show the Bush administration to be in disarray at the top. It would politically damage the administration precisely where it would hurt the most -- out there among millions of seemingly apolitical, independent swing voters, the sort of people who are aloof from the Washington foreign policy debates, equally detached from the moral pleas of the neoconservatives and from the foreign policy realism of Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger.
Conceivably, Bush could survive the furor of a break with Powell and win reelection through a quick, flawless military operation in Iraq (although the experience of Bush's father in 1992 shows that even this proposition is questionable). But that begs the question: What happens if a U.S. military intervention in Iraq is something short of flawless? What Powell says and does could indirectly affect how the American public would perceive a mixed outcome.
What, exactly, will be the American public's standards for judging success or failure in Iraq? Will it be considered a success for the Bush administration if the United States suffers 900 casualties? How about 4,000? What if a war drags on for three months? Eleven months? If things should get messy in Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East, how much mess will Americans tolerate before they start giving credence afterward to those who argue that, in hindsight, maybe the preemptive military action wasn't worth it?
The answers to such questions aren't written down anywhere, of course; they are inherently subjective and political. But you can bet the Bush administration stands a greater chance of winning American public support for a preventive war, and tolerance for whatever casualties and costs come with it, if Powell is on the talk shows defending the administration's policythan if he's a silent former secretary of state at home engaging in his hobby of fixing Volvos. And you can bet President Bush and advisers like Karl Rove are aware of this political reality.
Recent history shows that the impact of a secretary of state's resignation may not prove lasting. In the Carter administration, Cyrus Vance resigned in protest over the decision to send a helicopter mission to rescue American hostages in Iran. In 1982, Alexander Haig quit the Reagan administration after a series of battles with the White House over his authority. Today, Vance is remembered as a decent man and Haig as, well, Haig -- but neither resignation stood for an enduring principle of foreign policy, and neither carried the weight of, say, Attorney General Eliot Richardson's resignation from the Nixon administration when he was asked to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Powell, however, has a standing and an appeal with the general public that extend well beyond those of his recent predecessors; that is precisely why the administration needs him and why many conservatives resent him.
For their part, Powell's supporters maintain that talk of any resignation is wildly misguided, because the policy disagreements within the administration are narrower than people imagine and also because, in the end, the administration often comes around to something close to his point of view.
It's true that it is hard to find daylight between the words of Powell and those of Bush. The conservatives, who assume the president is one of their own, have tried to argue that the secretary of state is out of step with Bush's policy on Iraq. Yet the president's statements to date have been nowhere near as clear as the conservatives like to think. (Maybe Bush is merely being inarticulate; but he's also following the pattern of other, more rhetorically skilled presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy, who knew how to stay vague and to keep their options open until the last minute.) Even Vice President Cheney's admirably detailed case for military action in Iraq in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars last week left room to maneuver. He said the Bush administration would "proceed with care, deliberation and consultation with our allies" and that the president "will proceed cautiously and deliberately to consider all possible options."
Still, the disagreements within the administration appear plain enough, if not over whether to intervene in Iraq then over how unilateral that intervention should be. And the more moderate Powell forces seem to be in denial about the progressively conservative tilt of the administration on a range of policy issues. The secretary of state can claim some successes over the past year -- such as the administration's decision, after initial reluctance, to extend the protections of the Geneva Convention to Afghan detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay. But on larger issues, such as the Middle East, where Powell starts is not always where the Bush administration comes out: After the secretary of state tried to deal with Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority, the administration then decided to reverse course and call for new Palestinian leadership.
More conservative figures, both inside the Bush administration (Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) and outside, have been able and willing to set forth their own new vision of the world and America's changing role as the sole superpower within it. "Old doctrines of security do not apply," said Cheney in his VFW speech last week. "In the days of the Cold War, we were able to manage the threat with strategies of deterrence and containment. But it's a lot tougher to deter enemies who have no country to defend. . . ." That's a sweeping articulation of a new American foreign policy, one that sets the stage for preventive military action as the guarantee of security.
Powell has been unwilling or unable to set forth an alternative vision. Throughout his life, his extraordinary talents have been in managing and judging people and organizations, not in coming up with new words or policy formulations. His model was George Marshall, not George Kennan. Once, as a rising military officer during the late 1970s, when he turned down a staff job at the National Security Council, he told one listener that he didn't like that sort of analytic work.
Without offering some new vision, however, Powell will be left in the position of working out the details and execution of an American foreign policy in which conservatives have both the ideas and the initiative. His role would be one of a moderating influence within the administration, not the driving force.
Which brings us back to the explanation that the current debate inside the administration is not over whether to move against Iraq, but how, when, whether and with what allies, and with what plans for the aftermath. At some point in the next few months, Bush will answer those questions. What if the president decides on an intervention that is essentially unilateral in nature, one that is made over the opposition of America's allies and friends?
Once the Bush administration's Iraq decision is clear, detailed and final, Powell will have to decide whether to put his stature behind it or not. Either way, his autobiography, "My American Journey," is about to get an important new chapter. Powell will soon define himself, perhaps more clearly than he ever has, and when he does, some of the various delusions concerning him are certain to be dispelled.
James Mann, former diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is writing a book about foreign policy and the Bush administration.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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