The Story of Colin Powell
By Alex Ricciuti

But what was most surprising about Baker's comments at the time was how he brazenly declared that the President shared fully Secretary of State Colin Powell's vision of the world. A vision Colin Powell shares with those who nurtured his talent and career; the Bush I so-called 'realists'. These include Baker, his pals Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger, and of course, the current president's father himself; defined as realists in opposition to the neo-conservative ideologues of the Reagan White House. Hearing this in October of 2001, it seemed as if Baker was making the likely well informed assumption that ultimately the former president, never a friend of the arch-conservative ideologues, a man who shares a profound mutual respect and a strong, personal friendship with Colin Powell, exercised a unique influence on the current president despite the chest-pounding rhetoric.

Today, some two wars later, one can look back and believe that for anyone to have made that mistaken assumption would have been quite understandable. But if James Baker III himself has so misunderstood George W. Bush that he could so lightly scoff at the idea of 'going after Iraq', then what are we to think about those who say today that Iraq was a unique case and marks the end of such military adventurism? What else is in store if the Bush administration continues to heed to the advice of its most rightist elements? Figures like former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who are the intellectual architects of the Iraq policy and have made no secret of their desires to deal with Iran and Syria as well.

Baker and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft have now become part of a small GOP contingent increasingly alarmed about the president's unilateralist and hawkish leanings. (Of course, Democrats are nowhere to be found in all of this). The two led the op-ed offensive in the fall of 2002 by writing pieces in the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal urging the President not to forgo diplomacy and international legitimacy in approaching the issue of Iraq. There is no way these Bush family loyalists would have done so without the former president's consent and this seemed a strange way for Bush Senior to be applying pressure to George Junior. One would assume he could have privately counseled him, father to son, but then again, how are we to understand the workings of such a unique and awkward relationship. (Imagine having to call your son Mr. President.) Bush did ultimately go to the UN, but the realists' victory was short-lived and made irrelevant by the failure to secure UN support.

In the meantime, Scowcroft's criticism has become bolder and he openly worries about jeopardizing the NATO alliance, the UN and the good will of other traditional allies. According to the Washington Post, Scowcroft now has 'limited' access to the White House. This probably means the president will only see him at the behest of his father, which may or may not occur.

So what of the remaining realist still in government? One should recall that Colin Powell had been ruled the odd man out in the Bush administration quite early on. His terse face appeared on the cover of Time on September 10th, 2001, with the teaser on the cover, "Where have you gone Colin Powell?"; an issue probably no one ever read. The story went on to claim how the Secretary of State was being eclipsed by conservatives in the administration; namely the 'triumvirate' of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz. The on again-off again nature of this split between Powell and the neo-cons, parallels the general differences between the State Department and the Pentagon, although the the president and the conservatives have done their best to stock even the State Department with their loyalists, undermining Powell. State Department Under-Secretary John Bolton is one such appointment. The twist being that much of the senior Pentagon officer corps favor Powell's cautiousness against their own heavily idealogical civilian leadership.

That divide continues to manifest itself today in the debate over who will govern post-war Iraq. The Pentagon wishes to do the job itself, as they were the ones to do the fighting. The State Department, having to deal with pressure from abroad for greater UN involvement seems to feel confident that they will be deemed a compromise between the two (the Pentagon and the UN). Already they have strong advocates for this in the Congress. But all that Colin Powell can do these days is urge the various players to make nice as events continue to out-pace him and he has to play catch-up when his president's policy matches rhetoric that many assume (including Powell) was just idle hyperbole.

If no one blames Powell for the sorry state that is American diplomacy these days, it is because never before have we had such a public understanding of what a Secretary of State really believes as opposed to the policy he is asked to carry out by his president. Everyone knows that Powell has been out-muscled by the triumvirate and that he likely opposed going to war with so little support and taking on such a lengthy, risky and costly commitment. The former soldier knows it will be his past colleagues in uniform who will have to bear the burden of rebuilding Iraq and dealing with the violent resistance that that may bring. Many thousands of American occupying troops in Iraq make a fat target for suicide bombers and we have already seen several such attacks. The lack of blame on Powell may also be due to his expert political talent in grooming his image but he cannot paper over his marginalization with clever PR for too long. In the diplomatic world in which Powell works he will soon realize that this undermining will cost him respect and relevance.

So Colin Powell, in the waning days of the war in Iraq, echoes his rival Donald Rumsfeld in threatening Syria and Iran and plays the good soldier once more for his president. But if Powell believes, as does the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, that he can still command influence and reign in this president's wilder, unilateralist instincts, both he and Blair may be falling victim to their own vanity. An affliction not uncommon to even the most modest of those who hold positions of power for too long. Emboldened by easy military victories, Bush himself doesn't seems torn between pleasing the hawks or Powell, even if Powell is to some degree his father's proxy. His respect for Colin Powell may derive more from Powell's compelling personal story and the former president's appreciation of the man than anything Powell currently contributes to the administration. Bush's own conduct seems to aggravate rather than abate his Secretary of State's continued isolation.

American history demonstrates to us that strong willed or empowered Secretaries of State are more successful than weaker ones in securing the true interests of the country, often against the intentions of inexperienced or wily presidents. When foreign policy is not conducted by a secretary with a consistent and reliable vision of America's role in the world, coupled with the will and power to enforce that vision, then things often go astray as policy is driven by highly political presidential advisers or the personal manias of individual presidents. Just think of how Kissinger tamed Nixon's madder impulses. Or conversely, how Vietnam policy was disastrously rustled from Dean Rusk by Robert McNamara.

Powell has never really been the decisive and confident warrior that he has sometimes been made out to be. His experiences as a black soldier in a newly integrated military at the height of the civil-rights movement together with having served through the nation's most horrendous defeat in Vietnam may have made him, made anyone, an inherently prudent calculator. In an administration of optimistic hawks, this automatically puts Powell on the defensive. He may be bright, a first-rate talent, tough and determined but he has been too emasculated by the forces that abound him. He has become but an endearing spokesman for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. His role at State now is simply to repair his President's hapless conduct of diplomatic relations within the narrow bounds of the administration's policy.

Powell may be left dealing with, and tarred by, diplomatic and policy failures that were never of his own doing. And if the Iraq policy turns out to be a success, moderate, muddled or otherwise, it will not be to his credit either. His is an inspiring personal success story but his biggest professional success, winning the Gulf War, is an achievement now turned into something entirely different. An occupation, reconstruction and categoric reconstitution of a fractured country, in a foreign culture America has little understanding of, rather than the simple defeat of a dictator/aggressor. History will tell us the final story of Colin Powell. Hopefully, he has begun to understand how limited his power to influence it has become.