-Caveat Lector- Print this article | Close this window Powell's useful role nearing an end
March 24 2003 The famous hardheaded definition of war is "the continuation of politics by other means". In the real world, though, war is the failure of politics. This war - undertaken at such cost to America's own interests - is specifically a failure of Colin Powell's politics. Even if you believe the war is justified, the route to it has been an ugly display of American opportunism and bullying, dissembling and dissonance. The Administration has neglected other crises around the world, alienated the allies we need for almost everything else on our agenda, and abandoned friends working for the kind of values we profess to be exporting. When the last insincere whimper of diplomacy failed this week, I was in Pakistan, where those who speak up for the values we espouse live with death threats from Islamic zealots. It was heartbreaking to hear the despair of these beleaguered liberals. They are convinced their cause - our cause - will now be suffocated by anti-Americanism, not because we are going to war but because of the way we are going to war. Let's hope they are wrong, and let's hope the war is a quick success, and let's hope President George Bush can regain the good will that accrued to America after September 11. But on the battleground of ideas - on the issue of how America uses its power - Powell seems to have been defeated already. When the war is over, when his departure will not undermine the President during a high crisis, he should concede that defeat and go. I cannot count the number of times in the past two years I have heard - occasionally from my own lips - the observation that the Bush Administration would be a much scarier outfit without Colin Powell. Allied diplomats, international businessmen and the American foreign policy mainstream have regarded him as the lone adult in an administration with a teenager's twitchy metabolism and self-centered view of the world. It was he who acknowledged that other countries had legitimate interests, and that in the application of America's power there was a case for generosity because what goes around comes around. If others, including the President, were given to hype and swagger, Powell's word seemed bankable - until the White House began misspending his credibility in its rush to the war that couldn't wait. Even if you did not entirely share his soldier's wariness about military intervention - if, for example, you felt he bore some of the responsibility for our foot-dragging during the horrors of Bosnia - you slept better knowing he was there to assess the costs and give the alternatives their due. For a time he managed to keep a lid on the new American exuberance. Our relations with Russia and China weathered the early roughhousing over missile defence and other disputes, in large part because Powell was such a calming figure. Old-fashioned diplomacy helped line up the world's support for our war in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror. Thanks to Powell we belatedly framed our grievance against Iraq as a United Nations grievance; that 15-0 vote on Resolution 1441 was probably the high-water mark of his diplomacy. Powell also, I am told, helped beat back the idea of fighting the war in Iraq on the cheap, with fewer troops and more high-tech dazzle. So he has won some big ones. But that is exactly the problem. His formidable skills have been too much engaged in a guerilla war for the soul of the President. Critics in the Administration and the media have compared his performance in the build- up to war unfavourably with James Baker's whirlwind of coalition-building before the 1991 Gulf War. But Baker was operating as his president's right arm; Powell was busy protecting his right flank. At least if the President had a secretary of state he fully trusted, the State Department might be allowed to attend to the other grave issues it has given short shrift: the dispute between India and Pakistan, the dangerously slow rebuilding of Afghanistan, the multiple woes of South America, North Korea's nuclear program. But Powell and his department seem to operate always under a cloud of suspicion. Despite Powell's efforts, the trove of expertise that resides in his department has been marginalised. The State Department is apparently, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, "old America". Let us pray the combat is better planned and executed than the diplomacy of the past few weeks, which managed to make the US seem simultaneously inflated and very small. The first UN resolution was coyly general in its wording, but the second - in all its misbegotten versions - was simply fraudulent, designed to cover up its real meaning, which was not disarmament but regime change. As Powell was deployed time and again to dispense credulity-straining information, I kept thinking of the wised-up passages in his autobiography, when he deplored the way Vietnam had eroded America's national conviction with "euphemism, lies and self-deception". Perhaps the single saddest moment of the whole cynical prelude to war was Bush's abrupt promise to take on the issue of Israel and Palestine, a paramount and long-awaited commitment that was demeaned by the crassness of timing. (Just in case anyone believed he was serious, the word quickly went out from the White House that it was all intended to buy Tony Blair some peace at home.) And much as I respect Estonia and El Salvador, there is something ridiculous about the list of our "partners" - a coalition of the anonymous, the dependent, the halfhearted and the uninvolved, whose lukewarm support supposedly confers some moral authority. Powell is not, of course, entirely to blame for the mess of the past few months. If you're apportioning fault, you can cast plenty at the French for demonstrating to the President that Powell's patient diplomacy was pointless. We can blame Rumsfeld, the anti-diplomat, who dispensed insults to uppity allies as if they were corporate subordinates. We can blame the White House national security staff, which is supposed to choreograph something resembling a coherent strategy. And we can, of course, blame the man at the desk where the buck stops. The most important reason the Secretary of State should go is that the President has chosen a course that repudiates much of what Powell has stood for - notably his deep suspicion of arrogant idealism. I don't mean that Bush is bent on a series of pre-emptive wars - surely the President would like to take the country into the election year at peace - but this is about how we throw our weight around in peacetime, too. Critics of the Bush Administration talk about the divisions in the Atlantic alliance and the UN as "collateral damage", as if, in the rush to get Iraq, the Administration has blundered. That assumes it was an accident. It seems more plausible that this was not an attempt to put spine in the UN and NATO, but to discredit them. The global engineers talk with such contempt of these organisations, it is difficult to believe they want to salvage them as anything but appendages of American power. The UN is indeed exasperating, and some of the international treaties concocted during the Cold War are indeed outdated. Surely the President is right to conclude that if we see a genuine danger to our country, we are not obliged to wait for the blessing of the Security Council to act. If you are going to demolish the old order, though, you should have something in mind to replace it - and so far, the replacement seems to be an endless series of pick-up games with America as owner of the football and, thus, eternal quarterback. Whatever you think of this idea (I think it is unsustainable), it demands a high order of diplomatic dexterity to pull it off. Not much of that finesse has been in evidence as our leaders have cast about desperately for followers, shifting from one rationale to another, bribing and browbeating, citing questionable intelligence and dubious legalisms. When I put the question of resigning to Powell on Friday, he was, characteristically, showing no signs of surrender. He has no intention of leaving, he said. He has the President's full confidence. He has been written off before. And Iraq is just Iraq - not the first in a series of military adventures. "I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that now this one's pocketed, on to the next place," Powell said. The larger question of America's role in the world, he said, "isn't answered yet". Such a loyal and optimistic man would make some president a great secretary of state. Just not this President. The New York Times This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/23/1048354475424.html Forwarded for your information. 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