Chalky cheese and cheesy chalk
(photo from the Christian Science Monitor)
Last week, Colin Powell reinforced his ’sacrificial lamb’ status in the Bush Administration by awkwardly suggesting that the non-existence of an Iraqi weapons stockpile didn’t matter so much if you could prove Saddam’s intent to arm up. He suggested it so awkwardly that the Washington Post chose to interpret his remarks as an admission that he might have stood against a decision to go to war had he known there were no banned weapons to justify one.
Don Rumsfeld, on the other hand, has had to contend with his own, alternating, reputation of steely, mentally adroit, frontman vs. unpopular, embarrassing, micro-manager. Both overlaid, of course, by the more general reputation of being a ball-breaking war-junkie.
Rumsfeld and Powell are often represented as the yin and yang of the Bush Administration - with Powell in decline after a collapsed chance at diplomatic intervention and the above-mentioned clumsiness with the Post. But if the idea continues that Powell and Rumsfeld are ideological opposites and that Rumsfeld is dominant because he is ideological, then the result is going to be a misconception of the future of Bush’s new-fangled foreign policy.
Powell Powell’s image as the exploited moderate is really interesting because on one level, it’s absolutely true. On the other hand, it generates a heap of frustration and confusion on the part of anti-war folks. Didn’t he come up with a doctrine of cautious intervention? Where the holy hell did that go? Why didn’t he resign? Doesn’t he believe in his own principles?
You can shed some light on the Meaning Of Powell by taking a look at the way he handled the sudden push for humanitarian intervention in 1992. Powell’s ‘doctrine’ of intervention argues that interventions should only embarked upon if, among other criteria, the US knows what it wants and knows that the situation isn’t going to evolve into a more difficult kind of commitment. In 1992 Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, was convinced that the twin situations of Somalia and Bosnia would present exactly the kind of vague, probably entangling missions that he believed the US military should avoid.
All very well, but the US went into Somalia anyway, and not only under Powell’s watch, but also Bush snr’s. After weeks of making it crystal clear to a critical media that the military had ruled out all option of humanitarian intervention anywhere, on November the 21st Powell authorised a policy reversal on Somalia so sudden that it made most commentators do a double take. What had happened to make the stonewalling Powell open his heart to intervention?
On November the 19th President-elect Bill Clinton did his pre-inauguration round of briefings with government officials. In his briefing with Powell, he made it clear that he thought intervention in Bosnia should be seriously considered. Two days later, the military dropped their resistance to intervention in Somalia and another four days after that, Bush made the decision to go in. Somalia was chosen deliberately - it was felt that Bosnia represented the truest form of death-trap. The inference to be drawn is that Powell, upon realising that his future president was set upon intervention of some kind, pre-empted Clinton by allowing, in a fit of exasperation, the “less dangerous” mission.
So Powell, a declared moderate, after resisting tremendous pressure from the media and from internationalists within the Administration and Congress, finally caved in on one of his firmest beliefs out of deference to the beliefs of his president. A personal history like that may help explain why, nearly ten years later, he was nominated for the secretary of state position, and why - given what he thought Bush’s foreign policy beliefs were in 2000 - he accepted. What he couldn’t have expected was how sharply those beliefs would change. But once faced with that, Powell clearly felt it more important to serve his superior rather than resign on principle - which would have scarred the Administration and ruined his political career with the Republicans.
In any case, a guy who spontaneously creates novelty cabinet positions for an aged musician without running a background check - well, it can only harm the integrity of the Department of Soul and the Ministry of Funk. At least we know Powell’s heart is in the right place. Which is what we’re all about here at hell’s paving stones.
Rumsfeld Rumsfeld is not an ideological figure in the sense that his deputy Paul Wolfowitz is. His convictions centre around reshaping the military to make it more flexible, rather than reshaping the world to make it safe. His project is to refashion the military into what he sees as a more relevant, adaptible and deployable force.
Rumsfeld has definitely used the “war on terror” to refashion the military into a lighter, more responsive organism - but he would probably find it easier to do so in a “war on terrorism” - that is, fighting actual terrorists. It was widely reported during the war on Iraq that Rumsfeld interfered in the planning and execution of the campaign as a test run of his lighter model. As a result, he was heavily critizised by officers who claimed that the civilian interference had resulted in a strung out and under-supplied army whose vulnerability could have been exploited by the Iraqi side. The “war on terror”, having evolved into a war on un-cooperative state regimes, is a strategy that employs relatively conventional warfare. As such, Rumsfeld, being a man who wants to downsize the army - and who found that campaigns like Iraq can’t be easily moulded to the task - is now less likely to advocate pre-emptive war against a country like Syria than he is to advocate covert interventions of the type that the Administration prosecuted in the Phillipines.
The future of Bush’s foreign policy This is not an attempt to claim that Don Rumsfeld is a positive force in the Adminsitration, and still less an attempt to claim that Colin Powell is a wholly negative one. What it is suggesting is that Rumsfeld’s main concern is not the foreign policy of his president, but the future of the military. Powell, on the other hand, has sub-ordinated his concerns to the foreign policy of his president.
If you want a genuinely opaque, sinister character in the Bush Administration, knock on Dick Cheney’s door. Then run. Further reading/masochism
For an interview-based account of Bush snr’s 1992 decision to intervene in Somalia, try: * Jon Western, “Sources of Humanitarian Intervention: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy in the US decisions on Somalia and Bosnia” in International Security, volume 26, number 4 (2002). pp. 112-142.
For another, even more exhaustively interview-based account, this time of the Bush Administration between September 11 and the conclusion of the war in Afghanistan, try: * Bob Woodward, Bush at War, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002.
When Powell was a hot tip for Republican presidential candidate in 1995, he released an election-fodder autobiography. Read it, if only for the suspiciously George Washington-esque “beer incident” on p. 18. * Colin Powell and Joseph Persico, My American Journey, New York: Random House, 1995.
For a treatment of Rumsfeld’s rise and fall and rise again (and of how much of his ass he owes to Dick Cheney), look up an Esquire magazine piece from 2002: * Wil Hylton, “Dick and Don Go to War”, Esquire, February, 2002 For Australians, it was also published by The Age newspaper, under a different title: * Wil Hylton, “The power of two”, The Age, April 20, 2002 (p. 3 of the Saturday Age supplement)
For an example of ridiculously charitable journalism, and a brief view of the working relationship between Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, try this.
For Rumsfeld’s micro-management of the Iraq war, find * “Rumsfeld war theory blamed for problems”, The Age, March 31, 2003, p. 3.