Poor Colin Powell. When the White House isn’t ignoring him, it’s overruling him. Bush tells Saudi Arabia about our invasion of Iraq before Powell, the administration rewrites the rules on following the Geneva Conventions without mentioning it to him, Bush’s neo-con buddies call Powell’s tenure at the State Department a “clear disaster,” the list goes on and on.
What’s worse, when Powell isn’t getting slammed by his allies at home, he’s getting slammed by U.S. allies abroad.
India’s former foreign minister has denounced Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in unusually strong terms, saying that Powell’s account of how he helped facilitate a dialogue between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers was “fabricated and baseless.”
[…]
“The way he has gone about claiming credit is a total concoction and a matter of imagination, the way he conjured up biological weapons in Iraq,” [Jaswant Singh, India’s foreign minister at the time] said.
And America’s top diplomat didn’t do much better in China, where Powell seems to have forgotten about the United States’ policy on Taiwan.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spent less than 24 hours in China this week, but that was enough to stir up a diplomatic tempest with some unorthodox and apparently unintended remarks about U.S. policy on Taiwan.
The fuss demonstrated anew the high level of tension across the Taiwan Strait and the strained formulas that China and Taiwan use to argue about their long standoff. But statements by Powell also drew attention to an expanding gap between U.S. policy, which has not changed in a quarter-century, and Taiwan’s steadily evolving idea of itself as an independent country determined not to be swallowed up by China.
Powell, in a pair of television interviews Monday in Beijing, said the United States holds that there is only one China and that Taiwan is not an independent nation. He went on to suggest that the Taiwanese and the Americans, in addition to the Chinese, are seeking to bring about the island’s reunification with the mainland.
The comments, broadcast by CNN and the Hong Kong-based Phoenix news channel, veered noticeably from the standard formulations of U.S. policy, which were worked out in three U.S.-Chinese communiques issued after President Richard M. Nixon resumed contacts with China in 1972.
I realize that the “One China” policy can be complicated. We officially acknowledge Taiwan as part of China, but nevertheless deal with Taiwan as an independent country, selling it weapons and warning China not to pursue unification through force. But by misstating the specifics of U.S. policy, Powell caused a minor diplomatic incident.
Alarmed, Taiwan’s leaders immediately accused Powell of springing an unfair surprise with a major policy shift in one of the world’s most volatile areas, and reaffirmed their passionate insistence that the island is independent — in fact, if not in law…. U.S. officials were quoted as saying Powell had just used the wrong language.
Of all the Bush administration officials looking forward to a post-government retirement, I suspect Powell is the most anxious to leave.