|
 ime
magazine a couple of weeks ago ran a cover piece lamenting the fact
that Secretary of State Colin Powell hadn't yet sabotaged Bush foreign
policy, a cause of great consternation among elite journalists.
Well, perhaps Powell's
moment has finally arrived.
He publicly dissed Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz — "Wolfowitz speaks
for himself" — at a Monday press briefing, reflecting
an administration split that the New York Times reported
on this morning. The Wolfowitz forces want a wider war, including
an effort to oust Saddam, while Powell wants essentially to settle
for an attempt at taking out bin Laden.
Powell's position reflects
three things: 1) the common wisdom among the elite media, urging
caution and restraint; 2) the lowest-common-denominator opinion
of our allies; 3) the institutional biases of the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy.
These are the factors
Powell's views will always reflect, because he lacks the most basic
ingredient to effective political leadership: ideas. Without them,
no matter how much charisma and experience you have, you are adrift,
a captive to the people and institutions around you, unable to impose
on them a direction of your choosing.
After a couple of thousand
words, the Time profile essentially came to this conclusion
about Powell and his existence so far as a nullity in the Bush Cabinet:
"Those hoping for a Secretary of Stature setting a course for
the 21st century may mistake the nature of the man. Maybe it is
unreasonable to expect something else from the ultimate staff guy,
the good soldier who punched four stars in 35 years in an organization
that rewards loyalty and prizes the chain of command — just
like his boss."
This is it exactly,
and why it is so appropriate that Powell's opposite in the current
tussle is Paul Wolfowitz, an intellectual in government, who came
into office with a vision of a Saddam-less Middle East — and
has stuck to it. For him, the ideas, the strategic vision are driving
the policy, rather than whatever happens to be the current state
of the general political ether.
Actually, it is probably
a mistake to characterize the internal administration fight as Wolfowitz
v. Powell. It's really Wolfowitz v. inertia, with Powell the temporary
(after he leaves, it will be someone else) stand-in for that most
pervasive political force in Washington.
Dowd
Watch
Pundits are in the business of saying, "I told you so,"
but one instance of this in recent days was truly astonishing. The
perpetrator was Maureen Dowd, who wrote yesterday: "Why were
we so blind?… They already tried to topple the World Trade
Center eight years earlier. Much of the Arab street abhors the United
States. The kamikaze pilots during World War II showed how easy
it is to turn a plane into weapon. Middle East C.I.A. analysts,
not even required to speak Arabic, should at least be expected to
have as much imagination as Hollywood screenwriters."
I scratched my head.
I thought I must have missed the hard-hitting Dowd series on "Terrorism:
The Threat from the Skies." Maybe I was away on vacation sometime
over the last two years when Dowd interviewed terrorism and security
experts and wrote a sobering warning about the risk of suicide hijackings.
Maybe I skipped, as too dull, the op-ed she wrote, holding up Israel
and Britain as examples, on the need for secure pilot cabins and
more sophisticated X-ray examinations at airports. Heck, I thought,
maybe I even missed the Maureen Dowd column on any aspect of
terrorism whatsoever. Because all I could remember over the
last two years were snarky comments on Gore's clothes and Bush's
speaking style, silly wordplay, and columns implying that the U.S.
relationship with France was the most important foreign-policy question
facing the Bush administration.
So we did a Nexis search,
and I have to admit that at least one column did mention terrorism.
It was after the Cole bombing in October, 2000. And here
was Dowd, carefully considering Middle Eastern politics in her usual
manner, turning over and over in her mind the strategic implications
of the desire of Bush advisers like Wolfowitz to get rid of Saddam
once and for all: "It is easy to imagine the Bush inner circle,
always reliving the glory days of Desert Storm, swinging into action
on the strategy of another Middle East war. You know Poppy is peppering
his son with e-mails like 'Talk to Condi. Get with Wolfowitz. Very
tricky. Water's edge. Nation with one voice.'"
Pretty prescient, huh?
Bad
Name
We should all be grateful that Secretary Rumsfeld today suggested
that the name "Operation Infinite Justice" is being dropped.
For one thing, it was terribly clunky. For another, it had an oddly
chiliastic ring. It sounded like something an Islamic fundamentalist
would come up with. We don't need to achieve infinite justice, just
some dead terrorists and toppled regimes.
|
