REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Powell Lesson
Will the State Department now support American foreign policy?
Colin Powell's departure as Secretary of State is being seen in the circles that lost the recent election as the departure of the last Administration "moderate," whatever that word is supposed to mean. But we suspect President Bush sees it as his chance to select a successor who can turn the diplomatic corps into an ally and advocate of his foreign policy.
These columns have often criticized Mr. Powell's department on policy grounds, but always with respect for the former General personally. He has brought many strengths to his diplomacy, not least his prestige both at home and abroad. His face-to-face meeting with General Musharraf helped to turn Pakistan into an antiterror ally after 9/11, a crucial step in overturning the Taliban and dismantling al Qaeda.
Mr. Powell has also proved to be personally loyal to his boss. Notwithstanding his frequent policy differences with the White House, he is a soldier at heart; once a decision was made, he saluted (even if the rest of his department didn't). His February 2003 speech to the U.N. on Iraq has been criticized on the left, but it was correct based on what everyone thought they knew at the time. Mr. Powell needn't apologize for making that case against Saddam Hussein.
No doubt Mr. Powell was also too trusting of the French in going for a second Iraq resolution. But Dominique de Villepin misled him, not vice versa. And it isn't the Secretary's fault that Mr. Bush never did seem to decide between the Pentagon and State Department positions on Iran, North Korea, or, most damaging, on post-invasion policy in Iraq. That is the fault of the NSC staff, or the President himself. Mr. Powell's job was to argue his case forcefully.
That said, Mr. Powell never was able to manage his department the way James Baker or George Shultz did. He arrived at State promising to improve morale, which had been brought low in the Clinton years. Fair enough. Yet his way of doing so was to represent the department's consensus views in the White House, rather than represent--and enforce--Bush Administration policy on his department.
One consequence of this approach is that Mr. Powell expended much of his political capital fighting the wrong battles. It may have gone down well with the Foggy Bottom cheering squad that the Secretary pushed--and the President agreed--to take Baghdad first by way of the United Nations. But if there's one lesson this and future Administrations will take away from that episode, it is never to hazard the purpose and prestige of the United States on the indulgence of semi-friendly powers.
A second consequence of Mr. Powell's failure to take control of his department was the near-collapse of U.S. public diplomacy. Partly this had to do with the department's misbegotten efforts to sell American values to the Middle East by way of a Madison Avenue-inspired ad campaign. But the U.S. can't be sold as a "brand," like Cheerios; what America has to "sell" is freedom and democracy. The larger problem was that so few in the middle ranks at State--the folks the media call "sources"--were willing to defend and advocate the President's policies behind the scenes; nor were they pushed to do so by their often equally ambivalent higher-ups.
Instead, the department's idea of public diplomacy too often amounted to spinning itself to an obliging media as the supposed last bastion of sanity amid an Administration overrun by neocon crazies. In one example that somehow went unpunished, Mr. Powell's own chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, described his colleagues at Defense and in the White House this way: "I call them utopians. I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it." That kind of talk may have hurt the Administration, but it hurt State far more.
The first task of whoever replaces Mr. Powell (as we went to press, Condoleezza Rice's name was being whispered) will be to ensure that the department acts as an arm of executive power and not as the in-house opposition. No doubt, engineering that sort of transformation will engender institutional resistance, just as it did at the Pentagon following Donald Rumsfeld's return and as it is now at the CIA with Porter Goss's. So be it. The world was transformed on 9/11; it's time our diplomats figure that out. If not, the Administration will simply have to conduct a real foreign policy via the National Security Council.
Which reminds us: If Ms. Rice indeed switches jobs, Mr. Bush needs someone stronger than the current cast at the NSC. One of the problems of the first term isn't that different parts of the Administration disagreed; that's inevitable, even healthy. The problem is that the NSC did a poor job of vetting those differences for the President, and an even worse job of coordinating policy decisions down through the deputy ranks. We won't doom anyone's chances by naming those who could do the job, but they include the members of his Administration who were most loyal to his first-term agenda.
