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  A Closer Look at Colin Powell: The Evil of Banality

A Closer Look at Colin Powell The Evil of Banality

By Gary Kamiya

Part 3: Part III: "I don't think he ever realized what power lay in his hands"

At the end of "Soldier," DeYoung writes, "Political Washington rehashed moments when Powell might have played his ultimate trump card. Perhaps overestimating their own political courage, some moderate Republicans insisted privately that they would have lined up behind him if he had only given them a sign." She then quotes various sources explaining once again why he didn't. "'It's easy for us to say, why didn't he just go in there and tell the president he's going to resign,' reflected one senior State Department official who had thought long and hard about the possibility that Powell would quit. 'But this man was a military officer for thirty-five years. When I go to see the president ... I understand that I voted for the guy and I'll vote for the next guy. That's the great thing about America. He's not the king ... But a military officer who's spent decades saying 'whatever the president of the United States tells me to do I will do because that's an order -- that's different.'"

Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni praised Powell for his ability to stay above the fray of office infighting, but added a darker note: "Powell is a pretty ambitious guy. I don't think it was in him to stop this by bringing down his president."

Powell is a sympathetic character, and DeYoung does a good job of allowing us to see the situation from his perspective. But Zinni's words are a reminder that the obedience of the soldier and the caution of the bureaucrat can also be self-serving -- and prevent one from doing what has to be done. There are higher duties than the military ones, or even the personal codes one lives by.

The tragic irony is that by failing to try to derail Bush's misguided war, Powell betrayed the very people he most wanted to protect: the soldiers. In "Plan of Attack," Woodward characterizes Powell's reaction to his fateful Jan. 13 meeting with Bush. "No way on God's earth could he walk away at that point. It would have been an unthinkable act of disloyalty to the president, to Powell's own soldier's code, to the United States military, and mostly to the several hundred thousand who would be going to war. The kids were the ones who fought, Powell often reminded himself."

Today, almost 3,000 of those kids are dead, many thousands more are shattered in mind and body, the number of dead Iraqis has passed 650,000 and the U.S. government wants to stay the course for at least four more years. Can Powell still believe that his act of "loyalty" was worthy of the name?

Just what Powell thinks about any of this these days is unclear. In a March 2005 interview with DeYoung, Powell rebuked media reports, "as he put it, that 'Powell must be so distraught.' 'Why am I distraught?' he said testily. 'We are working on our relationships ... look at what we've done with Russia, China, NATO, the E.U.'" And Powell went on to cite his foreign policy successes.

Woodward, in his new book, strikes a different note -- and throws down the gauntlet to Powell far more directly than DeYoung ever does. In an interview with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Woodward tells Levin, "I thought Powell was in anguish about what had happened in Iraq, with 130,000 troops still stuck there, facing an ever-growing insurgency.

"'I don't want to hear about his anguish,' Levin said, nearly exploding in anger. 'I don't have the stomach to hear his anguish. He is so smart and his instincts are so decent and good that I just can't accept his anguish. I expected more than anguish.'

"'What did you want?' I asked. 'An apology?'

"'Honesty. I wanted honesty. I don't want to read a year later or two years later that this is the worst moment of his life or something ... Powell had the potential to change the course here. He's the only one who had potential to.'

"'How could he have done that?' I asked.

"'If he had told the president that this is the wrong course,' Levin said. 'I don't think he ever realized what power lay in his hands, and that's an abdication. I think Powell has tremendous power' ...

"'When Bush asked Powell in January 2003 if he would be with him in the war, Levin said, Powell was at the peak of his influence.

"'Can you imagine what would have happened if he'd said, "I've got to give that a little thought"? Can you imagine the power of that one person to change the course? He had it.'"

DeYoung's book confirms what we already suspected about why Powell was not able to rise to the greatest challenge of his life. Like most good biographies, it leaves us with a feeling of inevitability. And in the case of Powell, a decent human being, that feeling is doubly bitter -- for him, and for the country he wanted to serve but ultimately let down.

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