Secretary Powell v. General Powell
In general, I’m not all that interested in “the blame game” on Iraq. Whether or not invading Iraq was the right thing to do, given what we thought at the time, we invaded, enjoyed some success by some measures, and became trapped in an anti-occupation insurgency in the midst of an Iraqi civil war. The primary issue in the current debate should be what to do now — that is, we should have a prospective rather than retrospective debate.
But of course the Bush Administration is wedded to policies that they think have a chance to justify their initial invasion choice. They would rather “gamble for resurrection” (of their poll numbers) with low-chance-of-success policies that at least postpone having to acknowledge their overall policy failure and might even, if everything works out as they hope, lead to a “win” in Iraq. So they come to the debate over future policy with a bias, policy blinders that prevent them from considering all options. Their bias — and the desire of administration critics to point to past failures (presumably as an indicator of the likelihood of future problems) — gives the discussion of Iraq a decidedly retrospective tinge.
Yesterday afternoon, though, I made an exception to my usual complaining about that retrospection, and I spent some time thinking about how the U.S. got into Iraq. The LBJ School of Public Affairs, where I am a professor, hosted Washington Post associate editor Karen DeYoung for a discussion of her new book, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell. (Streaming video of the talk will be available soon in the LBJ School’s “screening room,” here.)
In her talk, DeYoung cited many of Powell’s defenses of his time as Secretary of State; he rightly lists a lot of things at which he “succeeded” in influencing Bush administration policy. But she listed those successes in the context of the discussion of Powell’s overarching “failure” to guide policy on Iraq, probably the Bush Administration’s most important foreign policy decision. DeYoung never said directly that Iraq turned out badly because Powell failed, but she (favorably) acknowledged the criticism that his UN speech sold the American public on a war in which Powell did not believe. She also argued explicitly that Powell failed in internal administration debates because he could not develop any internal allies, and he never developed a personal relationship with the President.
I’m not sure how much of that is Powell’s fault: after all, even a charismatic leader cannot force other people to like him; the President gets the priviledge of choosing his friends and confidants. But thinking that way is, once again, falling back on the blame game. For whatever reason, and whoever’s fault it was, the reality is that Secretary of State Powell lost the debate and failed in his role as an “advisor;” instead, he ended up as an “implementer” — in fact, as a successful implementer, to the extent that his UN speech and a few other key pronouncements influenced public acceptance and Washington support for the President’s policies.
I don’t have any particular insight into the reason why Secretary Powell could not find any allies in the administration. I’m not even certain that’s true, although Karen DeYoung clearly knows a lot more about those internal relationships, and she’s confident on this point, so I’m willing to take her word for it. The question is what Secretary Powell should have done in response to the collapse of his hopes to play a key advisory role in the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. After all, his desire to be the top foreign policy advisor is apparently what motivated him to seek the office of Secretary of State to begin with.
And there’s a stark comparison: when Powell was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he suspected that the Clinton administration might not hede his advice to stay out of ambiguous, long-term commitments in the former Yugoslavia, Powell famously wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that put a marker down for the “Powell Doctrine” and channeled the policy debate away from interventionist options. The question is why Powell succeeded as a shaper of policy in the early-1990s but failed in the early-2000s.
The conventional wisdom here is that Powell was a “loyal soldier,” who said his piece to Bush and then saluted and agreed to implement Bush’s policy choice even after the decision on the Iraq War went against Powell’s preferences. That story fits the prevailing view of how American civil-military relations are supposed to work, but it doesn’t square well with Powell’s history on Yugoslavia.
DeYoung in essence presented a different view: Powell as political strategist. She never argued that he was self-conscious in this way, but in essence, she said that Powell did not persist in his criticism of the Iraq plan because he would have lost the policy debate no matter what he did. Powell was totally isolated in the administration — perhaps a strike against the President for not surrounding himself with diverse advisors or against Condoleeza Rice as National Security Advisor for failing in her role of coordinating advice from different perspectives. But DeYoung also extended the criticism to Congress and especially to Democrats, who for whatever reason, she believes, would not or could not have provided political protection for a dissident view of Iraq policy. Basically, DeYoung thinks we had a consensus in policy circles, specifically one that stifled Powell’s influence as Secretary of State.
This view of the policy process misses another important factor, though: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a much more powerful position than the Secretary of State. In the Goldwater-Nichols defense reform of 1986, Congress centralized a tremendous amount of power in the person of the CJCS. General Powell could speak with the authoritative voice of the military, and it was hard for other military leaders to quibble. His position brought prestige and also an enormous organization with a huge budget and a very visible global presence.
Secretary of State Powell, on the other hand, ran a small organization with a small budget, represented around the world by ambassadors who had less influence vis-à-vis other countries than America’s overseas military leaders (what we now call Combatant Commanders). Many foreign leaders would rather ask for a meeting with a Combatant Commander, who can really bring resources and influence regional affairs, rather than schedule a session with a relatively less influential Ambassador, whose influence on American policy funnels through a bureaucratic process and a weak position in the cabinet.
Colin Powell’s hero as Secretary of State is George Marshall, who many people think was effective in the job. Marshall and Powel both brought their own political capital to the job as a result of successful military careers. But Marshall didn’t face such a powerful, centralized military institution, either in the Joint Chiefs of Staff or in regional combatant commanders with established foreign policies of their own that undercut the State Department as the primary means of U.S. diplomacy. Perhaps the real trouble for Powell in the Iraq debate was the reorganization of the American government that centralized national security policy-making.
Goldwater-Nichols is incredibly popular in the policy community. So popular, in fact, that one of the ongoing policy debates over government organization is whether Goldwater-Nichols should be expanded to include the entire foreign policy community in government — centralizing power still further or, at a minimum, institutionalizing an inter-agency process (see, for example, the CSIS Beyond Goldwater-Nichols reports, especially phase two). But a new inter-agency process would not redress the imbalance of power in the foreign policy debate; it would simply provide a mechanism through which the powerful actors (like combatant commanders) would be able to beat down ideas from less powerful ones (like diplomats). At worst, the inter-agency process would lead to collusion and groupthink: fewer independent sources of advice to high-level decision-makers, because everything passed up to the top would have to go through the inter-agency vetting. Before we rush to commit to that kind of reform — like the rush to commit to centralizing intelligence reform after 9/11 — we should ask questions to identify the real problems in our decision-making procedures.
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