Powell's Real Job Was Lending Bush His Credibility

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

(PNS) -- The instant Colin Powell joined the Bush cabinet the scuttlebutt was that he would never be more than a foreign policy bit player. Powell was repeatedly skewered in the media and in political circles as "invisible," "fringe," "impotent" and "ignored" by Bush. Bush kept him around because he was a sop to diversity, gave his administration foreign policy luster and credibility and was the political favorite of presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton.

Powell certainly has been loyal to a fault to the presidents he's served. So loyal, in fact, that he took much heat for allegedly downplaying the My Lai massacre, deflecting Congressional attention from the Iran-Contra scandal, cheerleading the legally dubious Panama invasion, opposing aid to the Kurds battling against Saddam Hussein and, most important, shilling for Bush's failed and flawed Iraqi war polices.

Though there are bits of truth in these knocks at Powell, they miss the point about his importance to Bush, and the complex competing interests that help shape American foreign policy apart from Bush's, or any other president's, ideology and world view. Congress, especially the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committee, the various government bureaucracies, the CIA, the Defense Department, the IMF, key non-governmental organizations, the major oil, auto and aerospace industries and banks have a great deal of say in foreign policy matters.

Powell supposedly was frozen out of the Bush trust because of his dust-up with Iraq war hawks Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Iraq and the war on terrorism dominate national and international public policy debate, but they aren't the only big-ticket issues that Powell had to deal with during his state department tenure.

Powell has gotten grudging credit for his diplomatic adeptness in helping head off war between Pakistan and India, his performance at the Johannesburg global warming conference that turned an expected international humiliation into a coup for the United States, and for defusing the flap with the Chinese in April 2001 when an American surveillance plane was brought down by the Chinese. If Powell were the big policy loser with Bush that critics claim he was, he would not have attained the lofty respect and admiration of European, Asian and African diplomats. He would not be constantly in demand to attend the top international summits, confabs and symposiums on development issues. The international respect Powell received when he was jeered at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa in 2002 tells much about his importance and his cliffhanger spot in the Bush administration. The protestors blamed Bush, not Powell, for stonewalling greater development and environmental help to poor nations. Diplomats instantly scrambled to defend him.

Powell has also been willing to buck Bush and urge a formal nuclear treaty ban, massive economic development and HIV/AIDS prevention aid to Africa, and for jumpstarting talks with North Korea over its nuclear weapons arsenal. Another important gauge of the effectiveness of a secretary of state is how well he or she can sell an administration's policy not to America's international friends, but to its foes. Iraq is a perfect example of that. If Powell hadn't argued and held out for a bi-partisan, global engagement approach to diplomacy and intervention in Iraq, the bombs and missiles may well have flown in Iraq months earlier than they did, with or without UN support.

During that time, Powell got a reluctant UN Security Council to unanimously pass Resolution 1441, which demanded an immediate, fully verified end to Iraq's weapons- of- mass- destruction programs. Even the Syrians endorsed the resolution. Though Powell in a candid moment earlier this year said he may have got it wrong about Iraq's phantom WMDs (he later back-peddled from this epiphany), he still got the United Nations to go along with Bush's ill-reputed weapons claim. This was a tribute to the high regard with which many nations hold Powell. But more important, it bought valuable time for Bush to prep international, and domestic public opinion on the need for war.

Powell may have had little to do with Bush and Cheney's final decision to make war -- though there is much dispute about that -- but the decision was not his but the president's to make. It then became Powell's job as secretary of state not to publicly challenge that decision, but to put the Bush administration's best face on it.

Powell watchers were right when they bet he would be out after Bush's first term. But they always thought he was on the way out, throughout Bush's first four years, and Powell stayed. That's because he was a valued asset. Powell left because he wanted out, not because Bush told him to. That hardly was an odd man out.