US: Colin Powell became an outsider in a Bush cabinet dominated by hawks. Colin Powell said yesterday that he never intended to serve more than one term as Secretary of State under President Bush. But his departure is being seen by many as a triumph for his enemies within the administration, all of whom remain in place, at least for now. Conor O'Clery reports.
Powell was severely weakened by four years of attrition, during which he was marginalised on important policy initiatives by the hawks in the administration, principally Vice-President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff Mr Scooter Libby, Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials Mr Paul Wolfowitz and Mr Douglas Feith.
The favourite to replace him is National Security adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice, who European diplomats consider to be closer to the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld axis. The strains between Mr Powell and the conservatives go back to the first election campaign of Mr Bush in 2000 when Mr Powell several times declined invitations to appear with the then Texas governor at rallies.
To Bush's political adviser Mr Karl Rove this was Mr Powell's way of projecting his centrist tendency from the very beginning. This left him at odds with the closest advisers to the president.
It wasn't long after George Bush took office and appointed him Secretary of State that Mr Powell was complaining to his deputy Mr Richard Armitage that he had been reined in and put in the "ice-box", to be used only when needed.
According to Bob Woodward in Bush at War, the division between Mr Powell the conciliator and Mr Rumsfeld the hawk on critical foreign policy issues quickly became so irreconcilable that decisions were often made only when events forced the president's hand.
After 9/11 there was open discord in the war cabinet on the rush to confront Iraq, which Mr Powell opposed. As a former general, Mr Powell's instinct was to follow orders, but his contrary views often found their way into the media. The State Department became like the ship of state that leaked from the top.
His abhorrence of the neo-conservatives became the talk of Washington. Mr Powell's ideological foes could manipulate opinion as well. When the Secretary of State wanted to publicly propose an international conference after Israel moved back into the West Bank in the spring of 2000, he was overruled by the White House and well-placed leaks portrayed him as someone "too far off the reservation" and leaning too much towards Yasser Arafat. In the struggle for the president's ear, Mr Powell was at a big disadvantage. When the war drums were beating in mid-2002, Mr Rumsfeld was getting as much time as he wanted with the president, but Mr Powell could only get 20 minutes a week, with Ms Condoleezza Rice sitting in.
Matters came to a head when Mr Powell sensed that Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney had persuaded Mr Bush to take unilateral pre-emptive action against Iraq, and he asked Ms Rice to arrange a special session with the president. On August 5th, Mr Powell and the national security adviser had dinner with Mr Bush in the White House.
Mr Powell warned his commander-in-chief of the cauldron the US was about to jump into, and the costly aftermath. He used the slogan from Pottery Barn: "If you break it, you own it" to caution the president to go slowly and carefully. He also urged Mr Bush to go to the UN to build a coalition.
"It's nice to say you can do it unilaterally, except you can't," he said, according to Mr Woodward. The president was convinced. It was a rare victory for the Secretary of State who thought he had boxed in Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Cheney.
At a cabinet meeting a week after the Bush-Powell dinner, even Mr Cheney went along with the proposal to try to get the world on their side, but insisted that when Mr Bush went to the United Nations he should make the UN the issue, and insist that it was running the risk of becoming irrelevant if it did not toe the American line.
This advice, which Mr Bush accepted, was to make Mr Powell's work in maintaining friendly relations with allies even harder in the days ahead. But it was Mr Powell's turn to feel boxed in when Mr Cheney gave a speech at the end of August saying that the peril of an Iraqi nuclear attack justified attack by the US and that sending back UN inspectors was a waste of time.
In his September 12th speech to the UN General Assembly, nevertheless, Mr Bush used a key phrase urged by Mr Powell, that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions". Getting those resolutions would come to define Mr Powell's term as Secretary Of State, for good and ill.
In November he and the British Foreign Secretary Mr Jack Straw succeeded in getting a unanimous vote from the Security Council's 15 members - including Ireland - for Security Council Resolution 1441, authorizing "serious consequences" if Saddam Hussein did not comply with new arms inspections. It was the high point of Powell's diplomatic career.
During these negotiations, Mr Powell made no secret of his contempt for the hawks, on one occasion telling Mr Jack Straw that Mr Cheney, Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Wolfowitz were a "bunch of f . . . ing crazies", a rare moment of candour recorded by James Naughtie in his book on Mr Tony Blair, The Accidental American.
(The view of the neo-conservatives was shared by the British - a senior Foreign Office official said at the time that he considered them "sinister and dangerous", especially Mr Wolfowitz who was also "very clever").
Naughtie makes the point that winning the resolution was an illusory victory for Mr Powell, as it was no more than a diplomatic cover for irreconcilable difference and a pretence of agreement where none existed.
France, Germany and Russia (and Ireland, which left the Security Council at the end of 2003) did not interpret "serious consequences" as meaning war. The illusion of unity fell apart in December when the Americans refused to accept that the Iraqis were co-operating with new arms inspections. Relations with the French deteriorated rapidly.
On January 20th, French Foreign Minister Mr Dominique de Villepin infuriated Mr Powell by "ambushing" him at a Security Council meeting on terrorism by declaring "Nothing! Nothing!" justified war. Under British pressure, Mr Bush agreed to seek a second resolution to authorise an armed invasion led by US and British forces. In pursuit of this resolution Mr Powell made his February 5th, 2003 power-point presentation to the Security Council on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
It was a powerful, convincing performance and ultimately came to haunt its author. Many prominent anti-war doubters like columnist Mary McGrory of the Washington Post were convinced by his melodramatic gestures - holding up a glass tube containing a powder that could have been anthrax - and afterwards some noted liberals joined the "My God I can't believe I'm a hawk" club. They felt deeply betrayed by Mr Powell when it became clear after the invasion that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Only later did it emerge that Mr Powell had rejected even more outlandish claims of Saddam's weapons and connections with Al-Qaeda that the Pentagon had wanted him to include. Conflict within the war cabinet continued as the invasion of Iraq got under way, with the Pentagon holding sway over the State Department, which Mr Douglas Feith famously dismissed as the "Department of Nice".
Post-war planning by Mr Powell's team was dismissed by Mr Rumsfeld who personally rejected seven State Department officials that Mr Powell wanted to send to help Mr Jay Garner, the first US administrator of post-war Iraq. The internecine warfare seemed to debilitate Mr Powell, though the passing of time proved his instincts right about Iraq.
Prof Niall Ferguson points out in Colossus: the Price of America's Empire, that when criticised for not travelling abroad during the Iraq crisis, Mr Powell retorted that he made two trips that year already, "but the destinations and the duration were revealing: one was to Davos Switzerland for the World Economic Forum and the other was to the Far East".
Mr Powell did not visit Ankara once during the critical period when America wanted to send troops into Iraq through Turkey. By then he was practically an outsider in the administration where relations had become so strained that Mr Powell and Mr Cheney reportedly could not bear to be in the same room together. Announcing his resignation yesterday, Mr Powell said how great a privilege it was to work with Mr Bush and his staff at the State Department: he did not mention his cabinet colleagues.
Mr Powell was respected and admired by Europeans with whom he shared a similar language in terms of priorities, especially in the Middle East. He met former minister for foreign affairs, Mr Brian Cowen, several times and was regarded as a good friend of Ireland. What everyone in Washington now is waiting for is the announcement of who his successor will be, and the likely direction that person will take American foreign policy at a critical time for US relations with the rest of the world.