11/16/2004|||110060084209883114||||||

POWELL GOES

It hasn't been easy to find nuanced coverage of Colin Powell's departure in the British media. Fortunately, the Wall Street Journal weighs in with a respectful summing-up which nevertheless pin-points the general's failings:

"He arrived at State promising to improve morale, which had been brought low in the Clinton years. Fair enough. Yet his way of doing so was to represent the department's consensus views in the White House, rather than represent--and enforce--Bush Administration policy on his department.

"One consequence of this approach is that Mr. Powell expended much of his political capital fighting the wrong battles. It may have gone down well with the Foggy Bottom cheering squad that the Secretary pushed--and the President agreed--to take Baghdad first by way of the United Nations. But if there's one lesson this and future Administrations will take away from that episode, it is never to hazard the purpose and prestige of the United States on the indulgence of semi-friendly powers.

"...The larger problem was that so few in the middle ranks at State--the folks the media call "sources"--were willing to defend and advocate the President's policies behind the scenes; nor were they pushed to do so by their often equally ambivalent higher-ups.

"Instead, the department's idea of public diplomacy too often amounted to spinning itself to an obliging media as the supposed last bastion of sanity amid an Administration overrun by neocon crazies. In one example that somehow went unpunished, Mr. Powell's own chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, described his colleagues at Defense and in the White House this way: "I call them utopians. I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it." That kind of talk may have hurt the Administration, but it hurt State far more."

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/11/powell-goes-it-hasnt-been-easy-to-find.html|||11/16/2004 10:19:00 am|||||||||

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