But is America really interested? As Powell discovered anew on his trip to Africa last week, many people around the world seem to think otherwise. They accuse America of being interested in one thing only today–its own welfare. And they say the Bush administration wants to run the war on terror purely by its own rules, to the point of starting a new war in Iraq that almost no one elsewhere supports (British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a rare exception, met with Bush last week to discuss making a better case). The widespread sympathy for the United States seen a year ago–which led 200,000 people to gather at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and France’s Le Monde to declare WE ARE ALL AMERICANS–is all but gone. At a U.N. development summit in South Africa last week, Powell was heckled and booed, with some demonstrators chanting, “Shame on Bush.”
Today Colin Powell the diplomat is, like his young Angolan hosts, dancing as fast as he can–and on the biggest stage of his life. But it’s one thing to charm orphans. It’s another to win the world over to a war that few believe is in their national interest. Powell is a master politician, with the hand-grasping, eye-locking gift of intimacy that, many feel, could have made him president had he chosen to run. Yet until now he’s been unable to contend effectively with administration hawks like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, who have largely set the administration’s policy, helping to engrave an image of American arrogance in the world’s mind. In contrast to such unilateralist hard-liners, Powell and a host of moderate Republican allies come from a tradition of pragmatic GOP internationalism going back decades–and seen most recently in the first Bush administration–that believes passionately in alliance-building. Powell also evinces an almost Bill Clinton-like idealism about globalization. “We are attached by a thousand cords to the world at large,” he declared at his confirmation hearing, “to its teeming cities, to its remotest regions, to its oldest civilizations, to its newest cries for freedom.”
Powell is no dove on Iraq; like Cheney and Rumsfeld, he wants Saddam gone. But their differences over means have deep roots. The hard-liners believe the assertion of U.S. power is enough. Powell is wary of civilian warmongers driven by ideology. Reflecting on his two tours in Vietnam, he wrote in his 1995 memoirs: “Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support.”
So once again Powell finds himself in a familiar position, seeking a middle way, binding the diplomatic wounds left by the hawks. (As Rumsfeld once described their respective roles: “His job is to talk them to death, and mine is to hit them over the head.”) In Africa last week it became clear just how hard his job is. Though Washington had just committed nearly a quarter-billion dollars’ worth of corn to avert famine, funded a forest sanctuary in Gabon and sponsored a peace conference in Angola, all these good works were drowned out by the clamor over Iraq and American “unilateralism.” “The U.S. position on Iraq is creating virtual havoc in the world by pulling the focus from so many other issues of so much more importance,” said Richard Jolly, a former senior U.N. official who was in South Africa.
What happens this week in New York is likely to be critical. On Thursday, Bush will deliver a speech to the United Nations that, Powell suggested last week, will reveal damning intelligence about Saddam Hussein. “We now believe it is time to take the case to the international community,” Powell said. “The intelligence case is clear, that they have weapons of mass destruction… and they are trying to develop more.” The president’s September 11 anniversary speech to the nation may be just as important: new polls show a vast majority of the American public also feels the case has not been made. If Bush goes to war without popular support–especially if war drives up oil prices and wreaks economic havoc–he risks suffering the same fate as his father: plummeting approval and defeat.
Powell’s biggest diplomatic problem is that the Bush administration’s mixed signals on Iraq have begun to sound like Orwellian double-think. Prodded by his hard-line conservative base, Bush said flatly months ago that he intended to remove Saddam, hinting that renewed U.N. arms inspections wouldn’t work. Cheney bluntly restated that line two weeks ago when he declared that U.N. inspectors would “provide no assurance whatsoever.” But a group of moderate Republicans broke with the administration, saying that demanding a tougher U.N. inspection process was the only way to win international support, and Powell has backed that view. Asked by NEWSWEEK which view represents administration policy, Powell shot back: “The president’s view, and he said the inspectors should go back in.”
Late last week White House officials began to downplay their earlier hard line on ousting Saddam as their only goal, and to parrot Powell’s focus on U.N.-sanctioned disarmament. They also began to hint at a hawkish compromise reportedly sup-ported by Blair: “coercive” U.N. inspections backed by troops. But because of Bush’s earlier hard-line comments, many foreign officials now believe the Americans are trying only to set up a pretext for war.
Today even those far removed from Washington politics appear to be aware of Powell’s predicament. “He seems to be left on a limb,” says Jane Goodall, the famed chimp expert and conservationist, who tells NEWSWEEK she recently drafted a message to Powell from the African bush, by candlelight. “I sometimes write him cheering notes to say we’re all pulling for you.” Europeans constantly parse the Bush team’s infighting. “When [European Union Foreign Minister Javier] Solana comes to us and says, ‘I talked to Powell,’ we feel good,” says a European diplomat. “But when he says, ‘I talked to someone else in the administration and Powell,’ we feel better.” For these reasons, speculation is rife on how long Powell will last. (The State Department resolutely denies that he plans to step aside if Bush wins re-election, and Powell publicly dismisses his differences with Rumsfeld and Cheney as “nuances.”)
But election politics are at work even now. One administration official concedes that, for the president, the politics of keeping his conservative base–as his father failed to do in 1992–is driving much of the debate over Iraq. “It was not just the [‘read my lips’] tax increase that killed George Bush. It was those conservative strains in the United States,” says a senior GOP official. “If we’re perceived to be driven by the U.N. and all these treaties, man, we’re going to have trouble with the right the way his father did.”
Powell’s allies have long acknowledged they are ideologically outnumbered. But they insist they have always had reality on their side. “Things are tilting Powell’s way more than people realize,” says one official, who points out that, among other victories, Powell prompted the president to pledge the biggest foreign-aid increase in years. As one old friend describes him, “Powell’s a soldier–a very tough, disciplined, committed guy. He’s able to see over the trees and into the horizon. He understands, intuitively, that rarely is it one decision that will determine the outcome of battle. He will take whatever he’s given and deal with it, try to maneuver and massage.”
Yet that may also be part of his problem: Powell is a subtle massager when it comes to making his case; Rumsfeld is a damn-the-torpedoes dreadnought. That is also true of Powell’s diplomacy, and some who are friendly to him wonder if he’s committed and fierce enough in defending his approach to Iraq to ultimately get his way.
Last week’s Africa tour was classic Powell: brisk, efficient and filled with Powellian touches, like spending almost as much time with four little girls as he did with warring parties at the peace table. In his calm, almost presidential manner, Powell quoted Lincoln’s second Inaugural (“With malice towards none…”) to the civil-warring Angolans, and crisply shuttled from meeting to meeting, mostly leaving good will in his wake. But no matter how hard he tries at personal diplomacy, the war on terror always seems to intrude. As a jovial Powell wandered into the jungle of Gabon–an environmental walk he called the “high point of my trip”–an aide got a call: an attempt had been made on Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s life. Powell listened gravely and later told reporters the attack means “there is still more work to be done.” Was that another hint not to rush into Iraq before another war, Afghanistan, is really over? Powell, as always, was too diplomatic to say.
CORRECTION In our Sept. 16 story “Powell’s Battle,” a photo caption inadvertently placed Colin Powell and American soldiers in Vietnam. In fact, they are pictured at Fort Campbell, Ky.
