It must be hell to disagree with Colin Powell. Powell and Vice President Dick Cheney apparently disagree about Iraq. Cheney thinks that Saddam Hussein must be toppled and any further diddling is pointless. Powell thinks … well, something else. Cheney made his opinion known by articulating and defending it in a speech. Powell's view, if you read the papers literally, has spread by a mysterious process akin to osmosis. The secretary of state is "known to believe" or is pigeonholed by unnamed "associates" or (my favorite) has made his opinion known "quietly."
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StumbleUponAnd yet somehow, without an audible peep, Powell has managed to dominate the public debate about whether to make war against Iraq. How does he do it? Maybe, like dogs, State Department reporters can hear frequencies beyond the range available to the normal human ear. Or maybe, just maybe, Powell has made his case using the same basic method as Cheney—that is, by opening his yap and letting words come out—only doing so with small audiences of reliably discreet journalists rather than at a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
"As the debate over Iraq has intensified in recent weeks," the New York Times deadpanned on Tuesday, after days of reporting Powell's opinion, "one voice has been conspicuously absent." The article went on to explore the alleged mystery of Powell's silence, undeterred by the fact that he obviously has not been silent or the strong likelihood that more than one person at the Times knows this from personal experience.
A fellow journalist told me the other day that he admires Powell for making his disagreement clear without being publicly disloyal to the president. This is indeed the conventional view among the media. But it is peculiar, if not flatly wrong, on both counts. Clear is exactly what Powell's objection is not. He's against an immediate, irrevocable commitment to off Saddam Hussein. But where he draws the line short of that, and why, are unknown—or at least unreported—and untested. If you don't publicly state your position, you don't have to defend it.
Second, if Powell's view is not that of the president, he is only avoiding "public" disloyalty in terms of the comic distinction—treasured by the media and meaningless to everyone else—between things said publicly and things said "privately" to people who are certain to make them front-page news. If Powell's views were clearly in conflict with those of President Bush, spreading them furtively would be doubly disloyal.
But Bush's role in this debate is not to have a clear view of his own. Until the past few days, his position seemed clear: This Means War. What exactly means war was not entirely clear, but the war part was. Now he has wisely retreated to lack of clarity on both the whether and the why. This allows him to function like a holy rock for which all the squabbling tribal elders can claim to be speaking. The rock is irrevocably committed to "regime change." The rock has never wavered in its call for the return of inspectors. Meanwhile the rock's channeler-in-chief, Ari Fleischer, insists that there is no disagreement even among the rock's advisers. Colin Powell disagrees with him about that.
"Disarray" is the approved label for the peculiar process by which this nation is deciding whether to go to war against Iraq. Enormous power has been vested in the editors of newspaper op-ed pages, who get to decide which former official of the previous Bush administration will get the next opportunity to remind the world that he is still alive. Bush du Jour lets his people squabble in public. All deplorably chaotic to the orderly minds of foreign policy land.
But a better word than disarray might be democracy. In theory, at least, it's like a high-minded Jeffersonian dream that the national debate about war and peace should be framed by a series of essays penned by former government officials who have withdrawn to their farms, ranches, consulting firms, and suchlike contemplative retreats. And Bush's sudden eagerness for a public debate and some kind of formal approval from Congress—though probably the result of a (justified) panic attack—may help to reverse the longest-running scandal in constitutional law: two centuries of erosion in Congress' power to declare war.
In practice, a bunch of turgid, self-regarding pronunciamentos, full of half-hidden agendas, possibly ghost-written though hardly by Thomas Jefferson's ghost, are not exactly the Federalist Papers. And the general desirability of vigorous debate doesn't solve the puzzle of how a top official who is unhappy about some administration policy should balance the demands of loyalty and honesty.
In theory, once again, this one's easy: The official should argue vigorously then rally 'round. In practice, it's trickier. Does arguing vigorously include arguing publicly? Does rallying 'round mean defending a policy you don't believe in? On most issues, there is room for a fudge factor in all of this. But if the issue is war, in which many thousands of people undoubtedly will die, the cause had better be transcendently important.
The Bush administration will decide in the next few weeks that the cause is worth the blood, or that it isn't. In either case, shouldn't someone resign?
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Notes From The Fray Editor:
Most good posts involve discerning the meaning of the Bush Administration's international community theater version of good cop/bad cop. Ex-fed and Zathras lace that opedomancy with a discussion of journalistic ethics. (The snarkier posts are below those long ones.) Paul Reidinger joins Kinsley in denouncing the erosion of Congressional war powers here.
Remarks From The Fray:
I have ceased to be amazed at how journalists' standards and tradecraft abandon them when the subject touches upon journalism itself. So you speculate that Colin Powell is leaking to "small audiences of reliably discreet journalists"? And you, a well-connected journalist, are content to leave it at that?
Suppose a government spokesperson told you that some important public issue was, he believed, committed to a group of officials for decision, but that they could not be identified? End of story? Hell, no, you'd be salivating. You'd work your sources, have the parties identified in ten minutes and file a story with a screaming headline about a coverup, with accompanying op-ed about how sunlight is the best disinfectant, democracies die in the dark, etc., etc.
Why the lack of curiosity here? Powell has bought himself immunity by leaking. Journalists are co-opted and bought off by receiving "privileged" information. They feign blindness and stupidity so they won't be cut off. The sources of leaks, setting aside the occasional Deep Throat, are known to, or fairly easily guessed by, fellow journalists. They tend to go along, though, out of professional courtesy or at least a sense of reciprocity.
-- Ex-fed
(To reply, click here.)
Powell could be talking to State Department subordinates who then talk to the press on background. He could be talking to his opposite numbers in foreign governments, who then talk to American reporters, normally also on background. He could also be talking to Scowcroft, Eagleburger, and one or more members of Congress, who can use information thus obtained to support views they already hold.
Powell also can and has been quoted directly in public fora saying things that can be interpreted in more than one way. Is he a "closet dove," to use the old Vietnam-era phrase, or is he merely projecting that image to help him better do his job of relating to foreign governments put off by President Bush's conduct of foreign policy? Or, are reporters and commentators interpreting Powell's remarks in the context of what they would like to think he believes?
All three of these possibilities could be true at once. Powell's public standing gives him latitude to make statements that other Bush administraiton officials might not, but his record in government suggests he is a bureaucratic survivor before anything else. He knows where the line is with this President, as he did with the last three he served, all of whom he disagreed with from time to time. As to whether Powell, for example, favors inspections in Iraq as a means of winning allied support for war and remaining focused on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (which is Kissinger's position) or as a means of avoiding war altogether (which is Scowcroft's), or simply as a means of delay for one of several possible reasons, we just don't know.
And neither may he. Colin Powell was appointed Secretary of State for several reasons, but his resemblance to Dean Acheson or Henry Kissinger as a foreign policy strategist was not one of them. Nor, plainly, was his personal closeness to his President; otherwise we would not hear different statements about American foreign policy coming from so many different sources within the administration. Powell's record eleven years ago suggests he would be reluctant to commit troops to war against Iraq, but reluctance is an attitude, not a policy.
A Secretary of State honestly uncertain of how to proceed, unsure his President will follow his advice, and determined not to lose all control of an important aspect of American foreign policy might well use a sympathetic media as insurance against having his views disregarded. For the tactic to work his statements to the press would need to be cloaked in ambiguity and not directly contradict anything the President (as opposed to the Vice President or the Security Advisor) has said, but still make plain to others in the administration that this Secretary of State will not allow foreign policy to be made without him.
It goes without saying that in an administration headed by a strong President who knew what he wanted in foreign policy such machinations would not be necessary, but we don't have one of those now.
-- Zathras
(To reply, click here.)
The President's apparent hesitation about war with Iraq is not hesitation about going to war. Rather, it is a hesitation to see how much leeway he will have with both congress and the American people in moving toward and carrying out the war. I don't believe that he cares about allies (though he would like them on board), and I don't think he really has anything more than a wishful concept of what will come after the expected victory (he sees something like what he believes is happening in Afghanistan, at the very least). His finger on the pulse of the American people is more of what he can get away with and have them still support him; a political calculation rather than either an ideological or philosophical calculation.
-- mracmuth
(To reply, click here.)
Frankly, I think that no one in the White House knows what to think, although they are all very good at snarling and growling when it comes to Iraq. So, how could Powell be accused of disloyalty? Everyone in the White House gives confused speeches about our intentions vis-a-vis Iraq, and Powell does the same thing. He fits right in.
-- TC3
(To reply, click here.)
(9/6)