Empty Powell
Colin Powell lacks the most basic ingredient to effective political leadership: ideas.

September 20, 2001 5:10 p.m.

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.