The Bush administration doesn’t deserve Colin Powell

The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd weighed in on Sunday on one of my favorite topics: the continuing animosity festering between Colin Powell’s State Department and Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Department.

As Dowd, whose biting columns are usually mean but always brilliant, explained about the ongoing feud, battles of State vs. Defense are more than just competing personalities. Dowd described it as an “epochal” clash that will ultimately define “whether America will lead by fear, aggression and force of arms or by diplomacy, moderation and example.” If you’ve been reading The Carpetbagger Report for more than a week or so, you know which side is which.

Dowd also created a useful scorecard, letting readers know who is one each side: “There are Rummy people: Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Feith, Bill Kristol, William Safire, Ariel Sharon, Fox News, National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the fedayeen of the Defense Policy Board — Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Mr. Gingrich, Ken Adelman — and the fifth column at State, John Bolton and Liz Cheney. And there are Powell people: Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, Bush 41, Ken Duberstein, Richard Armitage, Richard Haass, the Foreign Service, Joe Biden, Bob Woodward, the wet media elite, the planet.”

I agree with all of this, but couldn’t help but notice something important about these lists — Rumsfeld’s allies either run the Bush administration or set the agenda for its policies. Powell’s friends, meanwhile, either worked for the last Bush administration, or worse, are Democrats.

With Dowd’s column in mind, I’d like to give a forceful kick-start to talk of Powell resigning from the Bush administration.

When government officials devote their careers to public service, but find themselves working for an administration that embraces ideas and tactics antithetical to their beliefs, the honorable thing to do is follow one’s conscience and resign from the government. Two well-respected and long-time public servants resigned in protest from the U.S. Foreign Service earlier this year, disgusted by the administration’s foreign policy.

It’s past time for Powell do the same thing. It’s not because Powell is doing a poor job — I believe he’s performing valiantly under difficult circumstances — but because his colleagues in the administration have ostracized him to the point where his authority has been irretrievably undermined.

Last week I mentioned Newt Gingrich’s scathing speech in which he condemned Powell’s State Department as a “clear disaster,” responsible for a series of “diplomatic failures.” Gingrich, without mentioning Powell directly by name, called Powell and his allies “appeasers” — perhaps the ugliest insult a neo-con can utter.

While some in the administration have sought to distance themselves from the former House Speaker’s harsh diatribe, Gingrich nevertheless captured the neo-con frustration with Powell’s ideology and foreign policy. Powell’s ideas have now been rejected by the administration in several key theaters. His ongoing battle with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has turned into a defeat for Powell. Bush will sometimes begrudgingly take Powell’s advice (seeking U.N. support for an invasion of Iraq, for example), but then abandon the approach after a half-hearted effort. The president, I believe, has made it clear that his administration has adopted the neo-con line over Powell’s moderation.

So why would Powell stay? Why should Powell, a popular, decorated veteran, endure one indignity after another?

While I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the Secretary of State, I understand the high value Powell places on loyalty. I can appreciate that. Yet, loyalty should be given to those who respect your ideas and earn your trust. President Bush has done neither.

The administration’s foreign policy positions aren’t likely to change. By leaving an administration that has discounted his expertise and disregarded his advice, Powell can recapture the stature that has garnered the admiration of so many Americans.

The main problem, as I see it, is a consistent habit of the administration to either ignore Powell’s counsel in advance of a crisis, blame Powell once the crisis has unfolded, or both.

Powell is now facing intense pressure from his ideological foes within the Bush White House, but this isn’t the first time he’s been at odds with the neo-con hawks that are determined to set a hard-line U.S. foreign policy during this administration.

A year ago, for example, violence among Israelis and Palestinians was reaching near-historic levels. Powell urged Bush to engage the parties to at least sit down at the negotiating table and work towards a cease-fire. Bush rejected Powell’s advice, again, and called on Palestinians to elect a new leader. At the time, one former State Department official said, “I can’t see why Powell is putting up with it. He is losing every argument that matters. He’d do more good now if he did resign.”

Powell publicly rejected calls for his to leave the administration, while nevertheless acknowledging that he’s often on the outside looking in when it comes to the Bush White House, telling allies that he “won’t let those bastards drive me out.”

I’m certainly not the first to notice the need for Powell to step aside from this administration. William Beeman, the director of Middle East Studies at Brown University, said in early March that Powell is “caught in the gears of an internal ideological struggle in the White House” and should resign.

David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, came to a similar conclusion six months ago, as reporters grew more aware of the schism between Powell’s advice and Bush’s decisions. “But before [Powell] makes his dissent public, he should resign — and if he won’t resign, he should be sacked. Instead of representing the United States to the world, Powell sees his job as representing the world to the United States. It’s time for him to go.”

The most widely-seen call for Powell to leave came shortly after the war. New York Times columnist Bill Keller acknowledged that “the Bush administration would be a much scarier outfit without Colin Powell” and acknowledged that the Secretary of State is seen around the globe “as the lone grown-up in an administration with a teenager’s twitchy metabolism and self-centered view of the world.” Keller nevertheless concluded that Powell would make “some president a great secretary of state. Just not this president.”

I suspect Powell would view a resignation as tantamount to defeat, which makes his departure unlikely. It’s a shame, though. Powell deserves better than this.