Powell Shouldn’t Fade Away

In Washington, how you leave is as important as how you arrive. If done well, it can set you up for a better government job down the road or a sweet semi-retirement of the type perfected by Henry Kissinger -- a wealthy global strategist-diplomat without portfolio.

Colin Powell doesn’t have to worry about his afterlife. Not even a war for imaginary weapons of mass destruction has dimmed the glow of the most admired man in America. Anyone would die for his speaking fees, corporate board memberships and book advance. But his leaving has not been done well, most of all because it didn’t happen two years ago when it would have done some good.

Way more popular than the president, Powell could have been more open about his objections to the war in Iraq, instead of hinting at them. Although he was the administration official who objected most to the war, he was the one whose testimony before the United Nations -- based on cooked intelligence that turned out to be wrong -- persuaded many skeptics that it must be the right thing to do.

If he’d gone public with his objections or resigned in protest, history may well have been different. There aren’t many people who have that kind of power. But power unused isn’t power. To the bitter end, Powell kept thinking that the rookie who hired him to bolster thin foreign policy credentials would eventually listen, especially if listening to the other guys got him into Iraq in a way that was proving hard to get out of. President Bush listened at the margins, but the things Powell listed in his resignation letter as his accomplishments were also his frustrations.

Remember his firepower? In 1996, he disappointed the Democrats -- who had read his memoir of driving miles across the South to find a meal or bathroom for his family when moving to a new base -- when he rejected the party that had fought for civil rights and cared about his issues. Powell quickly became the GOP’s most popular action figure; he would have robbed President Clinton of a second term if he had run.

Instead, he launched America’s Promise, an effort that enlisted Fortune 500 chief executives in volunteerism -- pure altruism on Powell’s part, but used by Bush Republicans to show how a thousand points of light could substitute for a thousand social programs. Powell became corporate America’s favorite outside director, with a prominent seat at the table but only advising on issues that didn’t affect the bottom line.

What Powell didn’t know is that Bush’s plan was to make him an outside director on a grander scale. Bush got Powell to give the keynote address at the 2000 Republican convention. And it’s hard to think of a single individual who gave a more positive look to compassionate conservatism than he did.

And Bush, who loves being first, then made Powell the first African American secretary of State. But that doesn’t mean Bush, who welcomes only good news, ever appreciated him. Bush bristled when Powell would utter one of the forbidden words: U.N., multilateral, France. To have been effective in preventing a premature or misguided war in Iraq, Powell would have had to wage war at home against Dick Cheney and the axis of hawks who Bush actually liked: Donald Rumsfeld (Rumstud), Paul D. Wolfowitz (Wolfie) and Condoleezza Rice (too dignified for a regular pet moniker, but no one’s closer to Bush -- she’s the daughter he wished he had).

Bush knew Powell would soldier on like the great American he is. There are compensations, of course. Powell is loved around the world and inside Foggy Bottom. He whispered his reservations to Bob Woodward so that those fence-sitters he took to war would know that he did what he could. Let’s hope that Powell doesn’t wait for 25 years, like Robert McNamara, to tell us what he was really thinking.

What does a man who knows of war, unlike the others pushing it, think of his U.N. speech now? He said once that with no WMD found, there could have been a different “political calculus” and faulted the intelligence. But to blame the CIA is the position of his enemies.

Is he troubled by the 1,200 soldiers who have died in Iraq for a neocon theory of spreading democracy to the Middle East? The author of the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force could not be proud that Rumsfeld’s lean and mean mobile military botched securing Iraq, a mistake that soldiers in Fallouja and Mosul are paying for today.

The signals Powell sent tell us that he knew better. The hawks have everything they wanted: complete control of U.S. intelligence and the military to make real their ideological dream of the world. They’ve got that but they don’t have him. Powell’s salute kept him from speaking out when he was on the inside. Now Bush can’t put him back “in the icebox.” Like the president said, it’s time to spend some capital. If Powell waits for his memoirs, it will be too late, again.