conquistador

STEPHEN HANDELMAN

Last summer, the worst kept secret around Washington was that Colin Powell
would not be around in a second George W. Bush administration. The leaks,
apparently, were coming from the U.S. secretary of state himself.

"He's making it known to friends how unhappy he is, but he's never going to
say it out loud himself," one Republican insider, who has held senior
positions in previous U.S. governments, told me then.

That was, of course, well before the U.S. military victory in Iraq was
turned inside out by chaos and insurgency.

But Powell and other like-minded members of the "moderate" wing of the
Republican Party were already in a funk about the government that they
helped put into office.

Some, with a large dose of irony, were even quietly applauding Howard Dean ?
then the fiery front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination ? for
raising the hard questions about the war's origins and purpose that no one
else seemed ready to do.

Six months later, the split inside the Republican ranks has become headline
news. Washington Post writer Bob Woodward's Plan Of Attack, the book on the
origins of the Iraq war published this week is already the talk of the
country.

Woodward's biggest revelations come from Powell himself, who said in
interviews for the book that he opposed the war camp led by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney.

Just as startling was the revelation that Bush notified his own secretary of
state of his final decision for war on Jan 13, 2003 ? after having informed
other key members of his administration and the Saudi ambassador to
Washington.

In an Oval Office fireside chat, Powell wondered whether the president
understood the "consequences" of the decision, namely that military victory
meant the U.S. would be put in the position of governing Iraq for an
unforeseeable period, and that the difficulties inherent in that enterprise
could erode U.S. authority around the globe.

According to Woodward, the president responded "Yeah ... but I think I have
to do this."

Although Powell, ever the loyal soldier, went along ? and committed his
reputation in his February, 2003 speech to the United Nations ? a fissure
had opened inside the American establishment itself over the purposes and
future of U.S. diplomacy.

It is the most wounding domestic impact of the president's war.

After a decade of debate over how to use American power after the Cold War,
the idea that U.S. military weight should be used to strengthen its
bargaining power with emerging rivals around the world emerged triumphant in
the new Bush administration.

The so-called neo-conservative "hawks" believed America had a mission to
spread democracy that could not be achieved by its economic reach alone.

Iraq could be the test case, they felt. And it was the key reason for
committing American soldiers there, more than securing new oil reserves,
eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or fighting terrorism.

Thus American foreign policy set off on a path very different from what had
been pursued by U.S. Democratic and Republican administrations since the
1950s. Some, in fact, called it a return to the "idealism" of President
Woodrow Wilson, who led American troops into World War I to make the world
"safe for democracy."

Bush was called the first "post-Wilsonian" president of the 21st century.

But the Wilsonian strategy and the ideas behind it have unraveled in the
smoke of Iraq. Powell, who tried to straddle the line between both foreign
policy approaches, is only the most visible victim.

Whether Powell serves in a second administration may be a moot question,
since Bush may not survive the angry second-guessing about the Iraq
adventure next November.

"Traditional" (read isolationist) forces in the party, whose discomfort with
the neo-con advocates of aggressive foreign policy in the Bush
administration is rising, have now joined the alienated Republican
moderates.

"It doesn't look like the White House is as astute as we thought they were,"
Richard Viguerie, a conservative strategist, conceded to The New York Times
this week.

They may be getting the message. This month Bush approved a five-year plan
to train up to 75,000 peacekeeping forces ? largely staffed by other
countries' soldiers ? for use in hot spots around the world.

That would have been anathema a few years ago.

But U.S. forces are now too overstretched for the job, one administration
official told the Washington Post, noting that the new peacekeeping reserve
force "could be used by the United Nations."

Just the sort of thing, in fact, that Powell might have argued.


Stephen Handelman's column appears every second Tuesday.


http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...ol=968350116795


__________________
?All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are
endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a
spirit of brotherhood."

UN Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Article 1

jaberwokie

Moderate is a liberal leftist extremist word. Their definition is that
leftist extremist positions are moderate and anything sensible is right
wing or extremist.

susan cohen

It's as easy to say the same thing of the right.

Susan

m ii

http://www.timesofoman.com/newsdetails.asp?newsid=55269


Those zionist obermenschen are really brave, aren't they Pookie?