My friend Brad, a well-informed native of South Dakota (far from being a mythical state, South Dakota, with a population of just under one million and a capital called Pierre, really does exist — out there somewhere), who in recent months has bemoaned the fact that the US has pretty much lost all the good will it had gained from the international community after Sept. 11, wants to know if Colin Powell has really shifted gears and joined the hawks.
Beats me, Brad. As a long-time resident of Washington, I’ve followed the complex interplay between the Congress, the White House and the State Department for years now, a punishing assignment in itself, and I still don’t get it either.
Ever since his appointment as secretary of state in 2000, Powell was seen as the nice guy in an administration noted for its preponderance of bullies, winning the admiration of world leaders for his cautious approach to foreign policy and commitment to multilateralism.
Up till less than a month ago, the man had consistently called for a measured posture in dealing with Iraq, arguing for more time for the United Nations weapons inspectors and eschewing the use of “hard power” as a vehicle of conflict resolution. It now appears that he has joined the grandstanding of the hawks with his assertion last week that “Iraq’s time for choosing peaceful disarmament is fast coming to an end,” and the flat claim that “inspections will not work.”
As you read this, Powell will have delivered his much-anticipated speech at the United Nations on Feb. 5, a speech where every sentence will have been fully vetted, every thought deeply considered, but where the secretary is expected to throw to the wind whatever reservations he had had about the use of force against Iraq, thereby effectively abandoning his own cherished doctrine that force should be used only in “defense of America’s vital interests” around the world, not in pursuit of an American-designed world order.
In his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey,” Powell, who had served in Vietnam, told his readers that the lessons he had learned in that war convinced him that, when his generation came to power, they would have to exercise it with the utmost probity, never in a blustering fashion.
Now, alas, he appears, I say, to have joined the bully pulpit, along with those in the government, topped by President Bush, who have appropriated theological lingo to justify going after “the axis of evil.” (The original author of the phrase, David Frum, who had spent 14 months as a White House speech writer, has penned a score-settling tome, “The Right Man,” released last month, in which he describes Bush — a Yale alumni, thanks less to academic acumen than to the university’s affirmative action policy for the sons of powerful, rich, white men — as “quick to anger; sometimes glib, even dogmatic; often uncurious and as a result uninformed.”)
The word on the street is that Powell was pressured to abandon his doctrine, or ship out. He was becoming too much of a burden, an in-house opposition all by himself, hampering American interventionist policies even where, as in the case of Iraq, intervention is “justified.”
Now he is saying that “one must never rule out the use of force,” and hedging on the issue of linkage between Baghdad and Al-Qaeda, which would be a great casus belli were it to be truly established. But it has not. The administration, it will be recalled, has tried to pin Sept. 11 on Iraqis from the get-go, helped along by columnists like the New York Times’ William Safire and other right-wing representatives of the punditocracy, though the boys at Langley had, as far back as 1993, explicitly denied any connection there.
So, all aboard, this train is leaving the station — with the international community getting exceedingly concerned about the brazenly unilateralist manner in which American power is being projected around the world these days.
With the exception of Britain’s Tony Blair (he with the birdy tweet voice), whom the Economist has described as Bush’s “polite valet,” virtually the entire European community has become progressively more alienated from the US.
To the neocons, this is a scandalous display by an ungrateful, jealous and resentful Europe that is now “a smoldering caldron” of anti-Americanism — as if disapproval of the United States “for what it does, rather than what it is,” in the words of the Italian scholar Robert Toscano, is an expression of that xenophobic sentiment.
Truth be told, the criticism in Europe is pervasive, including Britain, where commentators in the mainstream press have pulled no punches. Consider the Mirror’s large headline a while back, “The US is now the world’s leading rogue state,” and the Guardian’s description of it as an “unrepentant outlaw.”
In France, Le Monde termed Bush’s Middle East policies “extraordinary, unjust and arrogant.” And in Germany, traditionally a bastion of support for the US, opposition to Washington’s foreign policy designs has hardly been limited to street demonstrations and hostile commentary in the media, for recall how, when Bush visited Berlin in the spring of 2002, the mayor announced that he “would have to leave town,” and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder ran his re-election campaign on a platform opposing Bush’s proposed war in Iraq.
My friend Brad was right — all that outpouring of support, sympathy and good will the United States got from the international community after Sept. 11 has been squandered on the altar of the Bush administration’s penchant for unilateralism, militarism and adventurism.
It is equally distressing to learn that Colin Powell, once a prominent advocate of caution in the use of “hard power” to resolve international disputes, has climbed aboard and joined the chorus of hawks hellbent on war.
— Arab News Opinion 6 February 2003
