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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Powell stuck with Bush way too long

James P. Pinkerton Newsday

Colin Powell would have been a perfectly adequate secretary of State – for a different president. But as luck had it, Powell was the chief foreign policy adviser for George W. Bush, who didn’t agree with his foreign policy advice.

A better man than Powell would have resigned years ago, but evidently he enjoyed the perks of power too much to leave them behind. So he hung on, even if the important decisions were being made elsewhere. But on Monday, Bush made it clear that his services were no longer required.

Powell was the product of two influences. First, there’s the “Atlanticist” tradition, emphasizing the centrality of European security, which has dominated American foreign policymaking for the last century. Woodrow Wilson, for example, took America into World War I to keep the Kaiser’s Germany from tyrannizing Europe. Subsequent presidents created grand alliances to confront the Nazis and the Soviets. Powell would have been happy to continue that alliance-minded tradition.

The second influence on Powell was the Vietnam War. His two combat tours left him skeptical of military ventures amid murky geopolitics in faraway places. He was no dove; his idea, the Powell Doctrine, was “overwhelming force” followed by a quick “exit strategy.” That paradigm guided his military management of U.S. operations in Panama in 1989 and Kuwait in 1990-91. The United States was in, and mostly out, of both conflicts within months.

At first, Bush seemed in synch with Powell’s vision. During the 2000 campaign, the Texan declared that America should be strong but “humble”; during his debates with Al Gore, Bush criticized the Democratic efforts at “nation-building.”

But then came 9/11, and everything changed in Bush’s mind. Powell, along with “Old Europe” and even the United Nations, supported the Afghanistan mission. Yet it soon became apparent that his bosses, the president and Vice President Dick Cheney, had a different and more ambitious agenda.

And so the Powell Doctrine of foreign-policy realism – defined as multilateralism, exit strategies and all that – was displaced by the Bush Doctrine. Its signature feature was unilateral pre-emption, followed by “generational commitments” to the forcible democratization of the Middle East.

Powell disagreed with this new direction, and there was no law saying he had to stay in his job. In 1915, for instance, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan disagreed with President Wilson’s push toward U.S. entry into the European war, and so Bryan resigned, leaving it for history to judge which was the correct position.

But instead, Powell tried to have it both ways. He went along with Bush, even taking the case for war against Iraq to the United Nations, where he put his credibility behind phony evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. For that error alone, no matter how innocent it might have been, a more honorable figure would have resigned. Yet Powell stuck around, weakly advocating Bush policies in public – even as, in private, he let everyone know he disagreed with many of those policies.

In background conversations that he knew would leak out into newspapers and books, Powell used phrases such as “right-wing loonies” and “crazies” to describe foes in the Bush administration. He even referred to them as the “Gestapo” – a particularly ill-considered choice, insofar as many leading neoconservatives are Jewish.

Now, finally, he’s gone, by “mutual agreement.” Bush, now re-elected, wants a foreign policy domo more in tune with his own views.

No doubt Powell will do well on the lecture circuit; he always has. And book publishers will call, offering millions for a memoir sure to contain lots of gossipy dish about his four years at Foggy Bottom. Maybe he’ll get his own TV show.

But this much is sure: Powell will be remembered as a minor, weak secretary. Nobody doubted his physical courage in the Army. But at State, he showed a lack of moral courage, of the guts to stand up for what he believed. And so he will be remembered as a mere order-follower, and an untrustworthy one at that.