I’ve long felt sorry for Colin Powell. It has to be tough to be asked to serve as Secretary of State only to have a president who rejects and/or ignores all of your advice about foreign policy.
There are round-ups of Powell’s tenure everywhere, but a few things jumped out at me. First was this anecdote from the Washington Post’s piece.
Administration officials said Rumsfeld, the other most prominent member of Bush’s war cabinet, will continue to run the Pentagon for the foreseeable future.
“The decision was made to keep Rumsfeld and drop Powell because if they would have kept Powell and let [the Rumsfeld team] go, that would have been tantamount to an acknowledgment of failure in Iraq and our policies there,” one government official said, requesting anonymity to speak more candidly. “Powell is the expendable one.”
That’s the Bush administration in a nutshell. Powell was right; Rumsfeld was wrong. But for the president to keep Powell would be to admit he was wrong, which he simply cannot do. As such, it’s better to keep the incompetent failure, who’s loyal to Bush and his worldview, and ditch the skilled diplomat with whom the president may occasionally disagree. The latter, in Bush’s mind, is “expendable.” How logical.
Despite his ongoing popularity with the public, Powell has to be the least influential Secretary of State in modern times. Every fight, controversy, and decision has broken against him.
When Powell was appointed secretary of state, such was his stature at home and abroad that he was widely expected to be the new administration’s vicar of foreign policy. Three years on, he finds himself the fig leaf of that foreign policy — the moderate front man for an administration that has been anything but moderate in its statecraft. On almost every critical issue — the Kyoto Protocol, the future of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Middle East peace process, North Korea, and, of course, Iraq — Powell has been the odd man out, his influence minimal to nonexistent.
For purposes of consistency, at least, Powell’s departure will make the administration’s agenda far clearer. For the first time, everyone will be on the same page. The bad news, of course, is that it’s the wrong page.
By accepting Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s resignation, President Bush appears to have taken a decisive turn in his approach to foreign policy.
Powell’s departure — and Bush’s intention to name his confidante, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as Powell’s replacement — would mark the triumph of a hard-edged approach to diplomacy espoused by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Powell’s brand of moderate realism was often overridden in the administration’s councils of power, but Powell’s presence ensured that the president heard divergent views on how to proceed on key foreign policy issues.
That certainly won’t be a problem anymore. The president will have everyone telling him exactly the same thing, which just so happens to be exactly what he wants to hear. Everyone who has his ear (Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney) has been proven recklessly incompetent and tragically wrong about foreign policy and national security, but pesky naysayers like Powell, who tried to offer a counterbalance to a feckless right-wing agenda, won’t be around to confuse Bush with competing ideas anymore. I’m sure it’s a relief to the White House.