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Wednesday, Nov 17, 2004

International

International

Powell's lonely war against conservatives

By Julian Borger— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

WASHINGTON, NOV. 16. When he was still a military man, Colin Powell drew up a list of 13 rules to live by. Most have come in useful in his four years in the Bush administration but none more so than number three: ``Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.''

Mr. Powell's positions on U.S. foreign policy fell with such thudding regularity that a Secretary of State with less philosophical detachment might have resigned long ago.

American power

A lone internationalist in an administration full of neo-conservatives heady with American power, he was publicly contradicted by the White House over North Korea, and had his negotiating position taken from under him while in the midst of West Asia talks.

Mr. Powell was barred from talking to the press about vital diplomatic issues, and in February 2003, he was sent to the U.N. to argue for a war he did not believe was necessary with evidence which later turned out to be almost entirely bogus, shredding years of carefully accrued international credibility in a single day.

The question constantly hovering over Mr. Powell's head over the past four years of isolation has been: ``Why does he stay?''

One answer put forward by his colleagues at the State Department was that he was a good soldier, and would never desert his post. That was no doubt all the more important a consideration after the September 11 attacks.

The other side of that coin is that he believed his struggle to rein in the radical militarist instincts of the President and his coterie of advisers was a battle that could not be shirked, for the sake of the country and for the soldiers who would be sent to die as a consequence of the decisions taken in Washington. That was Mr. Powell's lonely war.

Mr. Powell often spoke of his role in Washington in terms of conflict. In one of his regular informal telephone chats with (the British Foreign Secretary) Jack Straw, he joked he did not have to go abroad to face a jihad. ``There's a jihad against me right here at home,'' he said.

At home, however, Mr. Powell kept smiling. Rule number two on his list was: ``Get mad, then get over it.'' In his days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, he kept another aphorism under glass on his desk. It said: ``Never let them see you sweat.''

Policy coup

Mr. Powell learned by hard experience that going abroad could be fatal for his influence around the Cabinet table. When he was on a tour of central Asia in December 2001, his principal conservative adversaries, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, tried to stage a policy coup and cut off ties with Yasser Arafat, declaring him a sponsor of terrorism. The Secretary of State had to fly home and fight a rearguard action to reverse the policy.

Mr. Powell was the odd man out from the start. As the most popular public figure in the country, he had considered running for the presidency himself in 1996, but his wife, Alma, talked him out of it, fearing that as the nation's first black president he would be a target for assassination.

As soon as he took up his job at the State Department, it was clear that he would have little real power. The Vice-President's office was swelled with foreign policy staff who second-guessed almost every element of foreign policy.

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