The Economist: Farewell to Powell and his doctrine

Farewell to Powell and his doctrine
Nov 15th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda

America’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, has become the most high-profile in a number of senior officials to announce that they will not be serving in George Bush’s second term. Given that Mr Powell lost numerous battles with the administration’s hardliners, this is hardly surprising

IT IS a safe bet that Colin Powell, America’s secretary of state for the past four years, is more popular and respected around the world than his boss. Mr Powell’s more emollient, multilateralist style was much more to the liking of America’s allies and other interlocutors than the unilateralist, “my way or the highway” style of President George Bush. So those in the world’s capitals who groaned when Mr Bush beat John Kerry earlier this month are likely to have heaved a sigh of regret on hearing, on Monday November 15th, that Mr Powell was resigning.

Though it is not yet clear how willing Mr Powell might have been to serve a further term if Mr Bush had asked him not to go, his departure is hardly surprising, given how he had lost a number of crucial battles with the Bush administration’s hardliners—most notably the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Though in public Mr Powell maintained that some of his disagreements with the “hawks” were more perceived than real, he was widely believed to have tried to resist their plan to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Once the hawks had persuaded Mr Bush to go ahead, Mr Powell persuaded the president to at least have a serious try at seeking a consensus at the United Nations Security Council in support of the war.

When this got nowhere, Mr Powell, like the loyal soldier that he was before entering politics, swallowed his doubts and sturdily defended his boss’s policies, maintaining that Saddam’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction justified the invasion. Perhaps his most memorable speech was the one he made at the Security Council in February last year, shortly before the invasion began, in which he presented the “evidence” for the Iraqi regime’s possession of illegal weapons—evidence that has since proved to be deeply flawed.

When Mr Bush was first running for president in 2000, he was critical of the idea that America should indulge in “nation-building” beyond its shores. On winning, and making Mr Powell his secretary of state, it seemed that Mr Bush was likely to follow the “Powell doctrine”, which Mr Powell had developed while he was armed forces chief of staff during the presidency of Mr Bush’s father. In essence, his doctrine states that America should only use force in defence of its vital national interests; when it does so, it should use force overwhelmingly and should have a clear exit strategy. A corollary of this is that the building of multilateral alliances and the use of “soft” power (ie, diplomatic and economic pressure) should be preferred to unilateralism and “hard” power (ie, military muscle).

But everything changed on September 11th, 2001. The subsequent invasion of Afghanistan seemed to square with the Powell doctrine, given that its regime was harbouring the people behind the massive terrorist attacks on American soil. But, whatever merits it may have had, the war in Iraq seemed rather harder to fit with the doctrine, except by overstating the reliability of evidence that Saddam had deadly weapons capable of hitting American bases in the region. As time has gone on, the Iraq venture has become harder to square with the doctrine: the military force applied by America has been less than overwhelming, and the continuing insurgency has made it harder to discern a timely and honourable exit.

Mr Powell’s resignation comes at a particularly difficult time: when American forces are attempting to break the back of the Iraqi insurgency through a bloody battle to recapture the rebel-held town of Fallujah; and when the death of Yasser Arafat is offering a chance of restarting the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process (see article). Mr Powell will stay on until his successor is chosen and his staff say he will continue working at full speed until then (he is due to attend talks in the West Bank next week). But it may be hard for him to make any progress while every political leader to whom he speaks is anxious to know who will replace him.

Who Mr Bush nominates as his new secretary of state is likely to be an important indicator of what he has in store for his second term. Will it be more of the same hard-power unilateralism or a swerve towards a softer, multilateral policy? The former is more likely if the job goes to John Danforth, a Republican former senator who is currently America’s ambassador at the UN. There would also seem little prospect for change if Mr Bush gives the State Department to his national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who is so far the leading candidate to replace Mr Powell.

Already, Mr Bush has signalled that he is not about to go soft, by replacing John Ashcroft, his hardline attorney-general, with an equally controversial figure, Alberto Gonzales. Mr Gonzales is a long-time loyalist who served Mr Bush as legal counsel when he was governor of Texas, and was later brought to do the same job at the White House. In 2002, Mr Gonzales wrote a memo for his boss supporting the notion that the Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured in Afghanistan were irregular “enemy combatants” not subject to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The new paradigm of the war on terrorism, he wrote, “renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning enemy prisoners”. This was seen by critics as a wink at the torture of captives for information. Once again, Mr Powell fought against this policy, and lost.

There are signs that Mr Powell’s may not be the last high-profile departure from the Bush administration. There has been speculation that one of his main foes, Mr Rumsfeld, may also be about to leave. Many (including The Economist) called on the defence secretary to resign or be sacked after the prison-abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. But Mr Bush held on to him. This is partly because the administration is not terribly good at admitting to mistakes. But it may also be because Mr Rumsfeld is halfway through a transformation of America’s military, from a lumbering force of infantry and armoured divisions built to face the Soviets into a lighter, faster, supposedly smarter, technology-driven machine for the wars of tomorrow. Such a transformation has its opponents, and Mr Bush may conclude that the hard-charging Mr Rumsfeld needs to be kept on board to see it through, no matter whom this upsets. And a second Bush administration with Mr Rumsfeld but without Mr Powell is bound to cause dismay in many parts of the world.