Nursing several diplomatic failures on Iraq and buffeted by blistering attacks on his effectiveness from the Republican right wing, Secretary of State Colin Powell faces a critical credibility test this week: a Middle East mission to push the Bush administration’s “road map” for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
The plan is strongly backed by Powell over the objections of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and other pro-Israel administration hard-liners. It calls for reciprocal concessions by both sides, leading to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state by 2005.
While the Palestinians have begun fulfilling some of their obligations, such as choosing a moderate prime minister who says he is committed to ending terrorist attacks against Israelis, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon so far is balking at easing the military restrictions imposed in Palestinian areas or freezing unauthorized Israeli settlements.
When they visited the White House last month, Israeli officials offered to make some good-faith gestures to bolster Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, according to a senior State Department official.
“The Israelis came and promised to do a number of things when [Abbas] was confirmed,” the official said. “Now the question is: Are they going to come through or not?”
European and Arab leaders will be watching carefully to see whether Sharon delivers any of those concessions to Powell during talks this weekend–or simply looks past him to Israel’s influential supporters in the Pentagon and the White House.
That’s what happened a year ago, when Powell last visited the Mideast in the middle of a spasm of Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli military retaliations. While Powell was pleading vainly for restraint from both sides, the White House was supporting the Israeli crackdown.
“The problem, when you have a really split administration, is that when you send your negotiators out, they can’t negotiate confidently, and the other side perceives that,” said Lee Feinstein, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former Clinton administration diplomat. “It sets you up for failure when it isn’t clear that the State Department can deliver the president.”
Powell’s clout in Washington has been weakened because hawkish neo-conservatives in and around the Bush administration have been circling him for months, accusing him of insufficient enthusiasm for the Bush doctrine of using force to pre-empt perceived threats to American security.
Influential scholars at the administration’s favorite think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, have reviled Powell’s preference for seeking multilateral cooperation rather than unilateral confrontation to resolve weapons proliferation threats posed by the former Iraqi regime, Iran and North Korea.
Gingrich tries to draw blood
But it was Rumsfeld confidant and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who released the real blood into the water in a speech last month when he issued a scathing critique of the State Department’s effectiveness and, by implication, Powell.
“The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success,” Gingrich said.
Powell is normally among the most reluctant members of Bush’s Cabinet to engage in public backbiting, and on Friday he was still smarting from Gingrich’s assault.
“Criticism is part of our American system. . . . The State Department gets its share, and I get my share of it. That’s fine. Bring it on,” Powell told State Department employees. “But if it isn’t constructive criticism, when it’s destructive and it’s not fair, we will fight back to protect this department and to protect the wonderful men and women who serve in this department.”
Powell, a veteran of four presidential administrations and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is not accustomed to being on the defensive in Washington’s fierce internal influence wars. But two significant diplomatic failures in the period before the Iraq war–his inability to win United Nations Security Council endorsement for the war and his failure to secure Turkey’s cooperation for needed military bases–supplied his conservative critics with ammunition.
Some blamed the failures on Powell’s relative reluctance to travel, particularly in comparison to former Secretary of State James Baker III, who helped secure broad international backing for the 1991 Persian Gulf war with frequent trips overseas.
Rumsfeld plays interloper
Then came several direct challenges by Rumsfeld to Powell’s authority, first by trying to block State Department diplomats from participating in Iraq’s transitional administration and then an attempt to sideline Powell’s preferred negotiator on North Korea. Rumsfeld eventually backed down in both cases, but some State Department officials were unnerved by such direct Pentagon meddling in diplomatic affairs.
But Powell also has recent diplomatic achievements to his credit, and his closest advisers insist he has won many more internal policy battles than he has lost. They cite the release of the Mideast road map over objections, the first round of talks with North Korea despite Pentagon opposition and the recent thawing of diplomatic relations between nuclear foes India and Pakistan as evidence that Powell has the president’s confidence.
Nor did the president heed the advice of some Pentagon hawks who had counseled fresh American military challenges to Syria and Iran in the wake of the Iraq war.
“We turned neither left nor right when we got to Baghdad,” said the senior State Department official, who declined to be identified. “After the hawks got everybody excited and made threats, it fell to [Powell] to straighten things out.”
Then the official added, “How many wars does President Bush really want to fight between now and the November 2004 election? We are the ones who can deliver that [period of calm].”
Powell also continues to deliver something else to the Bush administration: a level of political popularity that rivals that of the president and is unmatched both at home and abroad by any of his Cabinet peers.
Somehow none of Powell’s troubles inside official Washington seemed to influence the Fairfax County School Board in Virginia, for example, which voted last month to name an elementary school after him. That brought to four the tally of schools across the nation named for Powell–four more than the number of schools named for Rumsfeld.
A welcome photo-op
Nor did an audience of New York foreign policy elites seem bothered last week by the “Will Powell resign?” refrains heard so frequently in Washington. The black-tie guests at a Foreign Policy Association banquet kept approaching Powell for so many autographs and souvenir photos that the secretary could scarcely finish eating dinner.
And word of Powell’s political troubles apparently never reached the downtrodden citizens of Albania, thousands of whom lined the country’s only paved highway a week ago waving American flags to welcome him.
