Haaretz
Kislev 6, 5765
The conversation in which U.S. President George
W. Bush informed Secretary of State Colin Powell of his decision to go to
war against Iraq took 12 minutes. Twelve minutes of information - but no
question. "I didn't need his permission," the president told journalist
Bob Woodward. Therefore, he never asked Powell whether he was for or
against the war. All he wanted to know was, "Are you with me on
this?"
And Powell was with him - "He's a loyal soldier," explained
his acquaintances - until he received a discharge at a time that was
convenient to both sides. Without harming Bush's election campaign. A very
predictable departure. It's good for Powell and it's good for Bush, as
well. Anyway, the entire world already knows that Bush didn't heed
Powell's advice. And what's the use of a secretary of state when he can't
convince foreign leaders that he represents the president?
National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who will replace Powell, is very close
to Bush. That will help her in the outside world, as well as inside the
State Department. The officials there, who have gone through some tough
years when they were prevented from exerting an influence, can hope for a
new era.
The question is only how they'll manage to get along with
Rice. The change she has undergone in recent years - one of the most
impressive in the history of senior civil servants - places her at quite a
remove from the prevalent views at the State Department.
And, in
effect, her relative success, as opposed to the weakening of Powell, is
representative of the process undergone by the entire Bush administration:
an administration that before its election was called "neo-realist," and
is now described as "neo-conservative" (and neither label is entirely
justified).
Rice joined Bush after a period of apprenticeship with
Brent Scowcroft, the cautious national security adviser under George Bush,
Sr. In the past, she has mentioned how she was influenced by the. book by
Hans Morgenthau,"Politics Among Nations," one of the pillars of
"realistic" thought, which maintains that relations among nations have to
be based on interests rather than on ideology. The "realists" refrained
from calling the Soviet Union an "empire of evil," for fear of damaging
"stability."
And this is the same stability in which Colin Powell
believed, when he explained his opposition to continuing the first Gulf
War in 1991. He was afraid that changing the regime there would cause
fragmentation in the country and would therefore "not contribute to the
stability we want in the Middle East."
Because what is surprising
about Powell and Rice is the degree of similarity between them in terms of
the station at which they joined the Bush administration - that of narrow,
cautious realism, which began with Henry Kissinger and continued with
George Bush, Sr. - as compared to the considerable distance between them
today.
Powell seems to have remained where he was: moderate, afraid
of ambitious undertakings, adhering to the famous "Powell Doctrine," which
he formulated as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and which is reluctant
to use force and defines goals cautiously. Rice, on the other hand, has
undergone a transformation. In the adviser who issued the revolutionary
document spelling out the updated security concept of the George W. Bush
administration, it is difficult to recognize the expert on Russia, whom
Scowcroft liked because she was, as he put it, someone who knew how to say
where we could cooperate with the Russians, rather than, God forbid, an
ideologically motivated fighter against them.
The Rice of recent
years presents an updated position. More hawkish, like Vice President
Richard Cheney's "hardheaded" realism, and
sometimeseven"neo-conservative," in favor of promoting democratic values
all over the world, in the style of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz. Her admirers say that 9/11 changed her. Her opponents say it's
all personal. Her closeness to Bush has distorted her
judgment.
Whatever the case, in her new position she will face an
interesting test. Further from the eyes of Bush, and closer to the
cautious State Department establishment, the question is which path she
will choose. In an administration that did not achieve consensus on a
single foreign policy issue from the time of the decision to attack in
Afghanistan, the assumption is that the new Rice will guarantee harmony
and unanimity that were not achieved with the old Powell.