In his pentagon office, not far from a picture of a Serb gun emplacement (used to ward off civilians pressing for air strikes in Bosnia), General Colin Powell kept an epigram from Thucydides. "Of all manifestations of power," it reads, "restraint impresses men most." Let's hope that Thucydides was right. Because Powell's elevation to secretary of state means that we are going to hear a lot over the next four years about the virtues of restraint in US foreign policy. The word is already a mantra within Team Bush, the perfect antidote to Clinton's "promiscuous" military activism. And Powell is the creed's embodiment. To the new administration, he brings gravitas and vicarious popularity-this son of Jamaican immigrants, who in 1989, aged 52, became the youngest-ever chief of the armed forces, is comfortably the most popular politician in the country. He also brings a rather straightforward view of American military power: don't use it.
This restraint, Powell likes to say, stems from his background as a soldier; one who recognises the human costs of war. But Powell's views aren't inherent in the experience of war; they reflect the particular assumptions of the post-Vietnam officer corps. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, where an act of heroism after a helicopter crash earned him a Purple Heart. By the mid-1980s he was military assistant to defence secretary Caspar Weinberger and in 1987 he joined Reagan's cabinet as national security adviser. He has carefully cultivated an "above party" stance, although, like most military men, has evidently found Republicans more to his taste than Democrats (especially Bill Clinton). Thanks to his ability as a communicator and his status as the most powerful African-American in US history, he has-particularly since the Gulf war success in 1991-been canvassed for almost every top job in the land.
It is, however, Vietnam which has marked him most. "Vietnam," explains the strategist Eliot Cohen, "has become the defence establishment's morality play, a cautionary tale of civilian meddling, military timidity, and ensuing-but unnecessary-disaster." Or as Powell put it in his autobiography My American Journey, "Many of my generation of Vietnam-era officers vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand."
That one sentence contains the three central ingredients of Powell's world view. The first, now canonical in the officer corps, is that military leaders should not "quietly acquiesce" to judgements by their civilian superiors about the use of force. The second is the refusal to wage "half-hearted warfare," the insistence that every military engagement requires either overwhelming force or none at all. But this "Powell doctrine" addresses more than how to fight wars; it also addresses when to fight them-namely for "vital interests," not for "half-baked reasons" like "nation building" and "humanitarianism." Powell summarises his doctrine thus: "Is the national interest at stake? If yes, go in, and go in to win. Otherwise, stay out." Sounds reasonable enough. Just not reasonable for the world the Bushies are about to inherit.
In fact, the Powell doctrine was already irrelevant when Powell was preaching it a decade ago. This is what makes the Bush team's talk of reviving it so puzzling. As a template for how and when to use force in the post-cold war era, the doctrine has proved next to useless. The discrepancy between Powell's world view and the world in which we happen to live is apparent from the general's own record. Had Powell been secretary of state in the 1990s, America would have turned a blind eye to, among other things, Serb depredations in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and even Iraqi aggression in Kuwait. "The Powell doctrine," says Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, "can be read as a reason to stay out of any conflicts except Desert Storm." That is pretty much how Powell himself has read it. Except that he opposed Desert Storm as well.
There is no small irony in the fact that Powell's superhero stature derives from his performance during the Gulf war-and from his masterful performance during press briefings, particularly the one at which he said, in reference to the Iraqi army, "We are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it." Not a few of his fellow officers found this absurd, because nearly every time Powell's opinions were solicited during the Iraq crisis, he offered the opposite advice. In the war's aftermath, the then deputy secretary of state Lawrence Eagleburger insisted, "I know personally that if Colin had had his way we would not have fought the Iraq war. President Bush and Brent Scowcroft pushed him into it." This appears to have been true from the outset. First, Powell dismissed intelligence reports predicting an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and strongly opposed a show of naval force to deter one. Then, when the invasion did occur, Powell argued against reversing it. "The American people do not want their young dying for $1.50-a-gallon oil," Powell declared in internal deliberations. "We can't make a case for losing lives for Kuwait." Writing about the arguments of Powell and others, Scowcroft recounts that he "was appalled at the undertone of the discussion, which suggested resignation to the invasion and even adaptation to a fait accompli."
The Powell doctrine's admonitions about limited war notwithstanding, the general's reluctance to go to war against Iraq was matched only by his eagerness to limit the conflict once it started. The day after the ground offensive began, Powell was already pressing for an end to hostilities. After only four days of fighting, and although American units had yet to encircle Iraqi forces, Powell convinced President Bush to halt ground operations. "The vaunted republican guard formations are no longer," the general announced. But he was wrong. With their escape routes clear, three largely intact republican guard infantry divisions simply packed up and went back to Iraq-where they promptly began massacring the civilians whom the US had encouraged to revolt.
It was there, in the marshes of southern Iraq and the mountains of the Kurdish north, that Powell's antipathy to "humanitarian" interventions was first brought to bear. When the extent of the guard's assault became clear, he lobbied vociferously-and successfully-against stopping Iraqi helicopter attacks. Powell denies that "if Saddam had fallen, he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read The Federalist Papers along with the Koran." But the issue wasn't whether Iraqi rebels had any use for The Federalist Papers. It was whether to aid those whom we had encouraged to overthrow Saddam's regime. And Powell argued not only that we should not do so, but that leaving the regime in place would actually further the aim of stability in the middle east. Nine years later, we are still living with the consequences of that wisdom.
Barely a year after the Iraqi uprisings collapsed, famine in Somalia once more forced Powell to exercise strategic judgement. Once more, he flubbed. As in the Gulf, Powell opposed the part of the Somali mission which worked, while bearing considerable responsibility for the part which failed-namely, the events that resulted in the pointless loss of 18 American GIs. For months, Powell stayed true to his doctrine and resisted arguments for a large-scale humanitarian operation. But public pressure, fuelled by televised images of starving Somalis, finally changed his mind in late November 1992. The initial relief operation was a success-so much so that the marines had hardly finished storming the beach before Powell began pulling them out, and the US transferred formal control of the operation to the UN. In fact, the mission was far from over, and catastrophe, rather than success, loomed.
"We sent Task Force Ranger with great reluctance," Powell told a Senate panel, referring to the ill-fated attempt to capture Somali General Mohamed Farah Aideed. He claims that he sent the rangers merely out of a belief "in supporting the commander in the field." But that's not quite right. The then defence secretary, Les Aspin, recalled receiving a phone call from Powell during which the general urged the defence secretary to dispatch commandos to catch Aideed. President Clinton, too, in a recent interview with the New Yorker's Joe Klein, quotes Powell as saying, "Somebody needs to try to arrest Aideed, and we're the only people with the capacity to do it." Powell, however, let Aspin take the blame for the ensuing disaster.
Fear of "mission creep" subsequently distorted Powell's strategic judgement in the Balkans. As in the Gulf, Powell vocally opposed the use of force from the outset. So too, of course, did the Bush administration. In 1992, however, White House and state department officials began to consider establishing a no-fly zone to protect Bosnians from Serb air attacks. Powell, famous for his short fuse, blew up. "Before we start shooting up everybody just so people can have something to write about," the general demanded publicly, "let's see if the diplomatic demarche works." "In any case," said Powell, "I do not know how limited bombing will stop the Serbs from doing what they are doing." Not that he would have proved more amenable to a sustained bombing campaign. The US, Powell complained, had no "vital interest" in the Balkans. "No US president could defend to the American people the heavy sacrifice of lives it would cost to resolve this baffling conflict."
Powell's position only hardened after Clinton took office. In his former job as House Armed Services Committee chairman, Aspin had argued forcefully against applying the Powell doctrine to Bosnia. "If we say it is all or nothing and then walk away," Aspin protested, "we are sending a signal... that there is no downside to ethnic cleansing." He continued to make the case during his first months at the Pentagon. "There it was again," Powell recalls of the case for bombing, "the ever-popular solution from the skies, with a good humanist twist." Acutely aware of the general's stature, the Clinton team quickly caved in. "So long as Powell didn't want to bomb," claims a former White House official, "we weren't going to bomb." America would have to wait for Powell to retire before it put a halt to the killing.
The appeal of the Powell doctrine is its simplicity. Alas, in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Gulf, it offered clarity only because it counselled inaction. The essence of the doctrine is its hostility to limited war. "As soon as they tell me it is limited," Powell said during the Bosnia debate, "it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not." But in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, limited war achieved precisely the results Powell had declared unachievable. Doing violence to Clausewitz, Powell declaims with pride that, during his tenure at the Pentagon, "we were able to constantly bring the political decisions back to what we could do militarily." But Powell has things back to front. It is political ends which should shape military means. When the reverse occurs, as it did in the Gulf, the result is likely to be an aesthetically pleasing military victory alongside political defeat. By contrast, the military assault in the Balkans appeared less impressive. But it set in motion a sequence of events which rid Serbia of Milosevic, while Saddam still rules in Baghdad.
Powell professes in his autobiography to have been "astonished by the death grip of old ideas on some military minds." But Powell himself is in the clutches of such a grip. Though it served America well in Panama and might do so again in the event of war on the Korean peninsula, his doctrine offers a singularly inapt guide for the future Bosnias and Somalias to which US forces will be obliged to respond. These unconventional conflicts do not lend themselves to an "all or nothing" approach. Strict adherence to the Powell doctrine means no peacekeeping missions, no punitive air strikes, no humanitarian interventions-in short, no operation the US military seems likely to be asked to perform in the near future.
But then that's the whole point. Powell will be secretary of state, not secretary of defence (at least not formally), and the Powell doctrine's theory of fighting wars entails a theory of foreign policy as well: crabbed realism. The US, Powell has said, should act only in those instances where "the cold calculus of national interest" is at stake. "In none of these recent foreign crises," Powell writes in his autobiography, "have we had a vital interest such as we had after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the resulting threat to Saudi Arabia and the free flow of oil. These later crises do not affect any of our treaty obligations or our survival as a nation." The new secretary of state has no use for "nation building," a phrase that reminds him of Vietnam. In opposing US intervention, he trots out the relativist cliche which so often provide cover for isolationists. Powell's realism, in fact, seems to derive less from the writings of Henry Kissinger than from Reader's Digest. The US should not intervene in Bosnia because the conflict has "ethnic and religious roots that go back 1,000 years," he wrote in a 1992 New York Times op-ed. Nor should America aid the Iraqi insurgents, lest it end up "trying to sort out 2,000 years of Mesopotamian history."
But even in cold strategic terms, Powell's brand of foreign policy restraint is out of place in today's world. His definition of vital interests as consisting merely of sea-lanes, oil wells, and canals would, if enshrined in official policy, translate into the abdication of US leadership. "In the aftermath of the cold war," says Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University and a retired army colonel, "we have shouldered global responsibilities, including enforcing international norms, which Powell's vital-interest criteria simply fail to address." When America refused to act in Bosnia, for instance, the humanitarian crisis quickly began to threaten a vital American interest-the stability of Nato. Powell may not like it, but the US remains the hinge of the international system. And when it sits idly by in the face of threats to that system, international order erodes. Quickly.
Finally, there is the question of how well-suited Powell's realism is to the American temper. In his speech accepting his new post, Powell lectured about the wonders of technology, mass communication, and other hallmarks of globalisation. But those very media make it harder to oppose all humanitarian interventions-indeed, they forced Powell himself to act in Somalia. The "CNN effect" is keenly felt in the US, where images of starving children and brutalised innocents routinely prompt public demands that something be done. To imagine, then, that Powell can play Metternich for a nation of soccer moms is sheer illusion. Nor should he: Powell's vital-interest standard denies that the US stands for anything more than material interest. Under its terms, indeed, US foreign policy would become indistinguishable from that of a frankly cynical country like France.
But it's not just that Powell has lousy ideas. The real danger is that, unlike in Bush Snr's White House, there won't be anyone around to pour cold water on them. "Powell's going to be running the show on foreign policy," says a source close to the Bushies. "The others are window dressing." To be sure, Powell and the president he will overshadow offer basically the same foreign policy perspective. Still, they differ on some key issues. Powell, for instance, has endorsed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Bush opposes. Powell, too, is less worried about Iraq than either Bush or his national security team, some of whose members have even spoken of "detaching" a portion of the country. And when Bush Jnr finds himself in conflict with his secretary of state, he may be in for a rude surprise. As Bush Snr's crew discovered a decade ago, Powell does not advise. He insists.
Hence Powell's third signature trait: his reluctance to accept political judgements with which he disagrees. Of all our military leaders, notes professor Richard Kohn, former chief air force historian, Powell is "the most political since Douglas MacArthur." It was under his tenure, Kohn adds, "that civilian control eroded most since the rise of the military establishment in the 1940s and 1950s." In 1990, with no authorisation from Defence Secretary Dick Cheney or any other civilian superior (and in the face of considerable civilian opposition), Powell began speaking publicly about his plans to restructure the armed forces to match his forecasts of the international scene. A year later, when he clashed with the Bush Snr team again-this time over the build-up of US forces in the Gulf-the secretary of defence had to admonish Powell repeatedly to leave political matters to civilians. "You're not secretary of state," Cheney lectured him. "You're not the national security adviser. And you're not secretary of defence. So stick to military matters." But Powell wouldn't.
As President Bush gave way to President Clinton, the general's protests grew more vocal. First, in October 1992, Powell went public with his opposition to using force in Bosnia, penning an unprecedented New York Times op-ed justifying his stance. Powell cleared the article with the Bush team, but coming at the height of a presidential election in which candidate Clinton was calling for forceful action to halt Milosevic, the intent was clear-all the more so when Powell reiterated his objections in a Foreign Affairs article published as Clinton prepared for his inauguration. "Whether the issue was military service for homosexuals, post-Soviet budget levels, or military action in ex-Yugoslavia," recounts Edward Luttwak, "Powell overruled the newly inaugurated Clinton with contemptuous ease." In at least one instance-the 1993 dust-up over gays in the military-Powell skirted the edge of insubordination. Exploiting Clinton's weakness vis-à-vis the armed forces, Powell went public with his opposition to the plan to integrate homosexuals into the military, letting it be known that he might resign over the issue and humiliating Clinton into negotiating with-and all but surrendering to-his own military chiefs.
This was when Powell was in uniform. Now that he's free from the constraints of military professionalism, such as they were, he's likely to show even less deference to his colleagues in the administration. After all, who is there to stand in his way? Condoleeza Rice? Powell dwarfs her in both stature and intellect. Dick Cheney? The ink on Powell's state department appointment had barely dried before he began challenging the vice president-elect over Pentagon nominees. How about Bush Jnr himself? If Powell questioned the father's considerable foreign policy experience, it seems unlikely that he'll defer to his far less knowledgeable son. The recent press conference, during which Powell lectured about his foreign policy priorities while Bush stood mutely beside him, offered an early glimpse of what lies ahead.
Indeed, it is strange that a family which prizes loyalty would reward a figure who so distinctly lacks it. This, after all, is the same General Powell who covered his rear during the run-up to the Gulf war by letting Bob Woodward know what a dumb idea he thought the whole thing was. The same General Powell who let his former boss Les Aspin take the fall for Somalia. And the same General Powell who hung Bill Clinton out to dry on gays in the military. Appointing a national icon from the South Bronx to be secretary of state may have its political uses. But when everyone around him-especially the president himself-stands two feet tall, the effect may not be the one George W intended.
If Powell were as skilled at deterring America's adversaries as he is at cowing his bureaucratic ones, his outsized stature might prove an asset. But that's not the case. Cheney, Rice, and the rest of the Bush team know Powell's flaws. They know, too, that he was appointed despite, rather than because of, his strategic judgement. Powell's selection was fundamentally about American politics, not international politics. And that's a big problem. As the Bushies will soon be reminded, Powell does not play by their rules, and the world doesn't play by Powell's.
