The Foreign Service Journal, February 2005

chance was to influence how it was done, not whether. He argued passionately for going to Congress and the United Nations, and he persuaded Bush.” So if the good fight was merely about style rather than substance, just how did Powell’s arguments alter Bush’s course? The administration would not have gone to war without the guaranteed rubber stamp pro- vided by a compliant Congress. And while some hard- liners would have preferred to ignore the United Nations completely, it would have been hard to argue the U.S. was going to war because of Saddam Hussein’s failure to comply with U.N. resolutions without con- sulting that body. And that effort was nothing more than a farce. Although one U.N. Security Council res- olution was passed in the fall of 2002, once it became clear a second resolution actually authorizing the use of force was going to fail, Bush happily went to war any- way in March 2003. Even if Powell did win style points with his argu- ments, the bottom line is they had absolutely no effect on the ultimate outcome. We invaded a country with no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to 9/11 or al- Qaida, just as the hard-liners demanded. And now we are bogged down in a war that is about to enter its third year, an estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, over 1,300 U.S. troops (as of mid-January) sacrificed, and over $200 billion squandered — with no end in sight. The war has not only been costly, bloody and unjusti- fied; it has made us less safe at home and more despised abroad than anytime in recent history. Like the escalation of the war in Vietnam 40 years earlier, the casus belli for invading Iraq was false. There were no vital national interests at stake, and the motivation was domestic politics, not international issues. Lyndon Johnson did not want to be accused of being the first American to lose a war. George Bush needed a war to provide a flag to wrap himself in. And Colin Powell delivered. Powell has been reported as “dismayed” by the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found. But are we to believe that the Secretary of State spent four days and nights preparing his U.N. speech at the CIA because he wanted to verify the intelligence for him- self, and yet nearly everything he said just happened to end up being false? Like Vice President Cheney, the Secretary of State does not have to leave his office to get intelligence reports. In Cheney’s case, he repeat- edly went to Langley to convey the clearest signal pos- sible about what he wanted the analysts to conclude. In Powell’s case, he crossed the river to avoid the skep- tics in State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and to practice giving the speech with a straight face. The U.N. speech was not the only time Powell crossed the line from failure to fraud. He lied about the justification for the war just as often as other key administration officials did. As documented in a report by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., on 125 different occasions between March 17, 2002, and Jan. 22, 2004, the five highest members of the Bush administration made a total of 237 misleading statements exaggerating and distorting the threat posed by Iraq. Bush made 55 such statements, Rumsfeld, 52, Cheney, 51, Powell, 50, and Rice, 29. A Squandered Legacy Powell likes to compare himself to another general who served as Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. But just as Dan Quayle was no John Kennedy, Colin Powell is no George Marshall. Marshall was the archi- tect of the Allied victory in World War II. His vision created a new spirit of cooperation, mutual help and support between Western Europe and the United States, which led to the establishment of the NATO alliance and the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe. He is the only soldier ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize because he was a true internationalist who promoted peace through cooperation and understanding among nations. What will Powell be remembered for? It could have been for the doctrine that carries his name, which holds that military force should be used very selective- ly. Powell chose instead to use the doctrine selectively. When a Democratic president wanted to use military force in Bosnia, Powell devoted himself to thinking of obstacles to prevent it. But when a Republican presi- dent wanted to use force, Powell found it more impor- tant to obey his benefactors than to adhere to his own doctrine. Powell’s arguments in favor of moderation did not fail to become policy simply because the perverted worldview of the neocons prevailed, however. The neocon philosophy was just an elegant package in which to wrap a domestic political strategy. The uni- lateralists at Defense triumphed over the multilateral- F O C U S 24 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 5