In a Business Week column Washington Watch, Richard S. Dunham today called on US Secretary of State to resign. “Constant policy differences and lost fights inside the White House make stepping down the wisest move. The hard part is when to go,” wrote Dunham. “The problem for Powell is that the respect doesn’t translate into results. For much of his tenure in Foggy Bottom, the nation’s top diplomat, a pragmatic multilateralist, has been butting heads with conservatives in the White House and the Pentagon. As often as not, he loses the internal battles. And even when he wins, he bears the scars of combat behind closed doors.”
Clearly this was written with the Iraqi situation in mind, but Powell’s head butting has been going on since he came into office.
Don’t get me wrong; this is not going to be an item showing sympathy for Powell. He is a political appointment and as such must suffer the consequences of his posting – and they can often mean isolation and abandonment: in short, the political wilderness can reach the upper echelons of government.
The question for political analysts to ponder is not what one politician says or thinks, but what is wrong with a system that seemingly makes Mr. Powell seem to be completely out of line; that makes him an impotent maverick?
I once traveled to Tokyo, Japan, as a guest of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. On a visit to the ministry’s Middle East bureau I was made painfully aware of something we’ll call the Powell Syndrome.
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The Powell Syndrome has affected foreign ministries in most major Western capitals for years. It works like this. The new minister/secretary walks in to the office after her/his election and is greeted by their top civil servants. They are briefed on a variety of subjects including on the Middle East. Through their term in office they receive dozens of policy papers on the region.
And here we come to the problem. The advice is heavily weighted.
In the larger countries, there is a desk for relations with each nation in the Mid-East: A Saudi desk, an Egypt desk, Lebanon, Iran and so on.
And one Israel desk.
So, when General Powell makes a speech or an off-record comment to a reporter that is out of line with George W. Bush’s stated policies, political analysts should not necessarily be explaining what Powell said, but rather “why he said it?”
Now let’s return to the Iraqi situation. Some 21 desks in the State Department are handing him daily briefings amounting to hundreds of pages explaining why it may not be the time to attack Iraq, or why the US should desist from launching an attack at any time.
And one briefing from the Israel desk offering the alternative view.
In his column, Richard S. Dunham suggested his “colleagues in the media are barking up the wrong tree. The real question to ask is not “will he go?” It’s “should he resign?” And at the risk of sounding heretical in pro-Powell Washington, the time well may have come for Colin Powell to go.”
I think, however, the time has come to ask another more crucial question: Has the time come to rethink the nature of the State Department? For after all, politicians come and politicians go, but bureaucrats stay. And it is these shadowy characters that form US foreign policy far more than a retired general, who, to be perfectly frank, often seems confused and at a loss for words once challenged and even on one occasion recently, publicly humiliated by Mr. Bush after the two clearly disagreed on the fate of who else but Yassir Arafat.