Posted on 04/24/2003 7:31:44 AM PDT by Happy2BMe
ASHINGTON, April 23 — Since the end of the war in Iraq, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has come under intense fire from conservatives within the administration, in Congress and at policy institutes long favoring less diplomacy and more muscle in the American approach to the world.
On issues from the Middle East to North Korea to the makeup of a postwar government in Iraq, Mr. Powell and the State Department have been battling hard-liners at the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, administration officials say.
In the face of conservative criticism, Mr. Powell has won approval from President Bush for negotiating with Syria on its support of terrorism, negotiating with North Korea on its nuclear weapons program, and promoting talks between Israel and a newly emerging Palestinian leadership to create a Palestinian state.
All those policies have drawn fire in recent weeks, most recently from the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, who spoke at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday and issued a blistering attack on Mr. Powell's stewardship of the State Department.
Mr. Powell has been the object of conservative criticism in several past policy battles, but the barrage was renewed with particular bitterness in recent days. Aides to Mr. Powell said they regarded some of the recent attacks as both puzzling and misguided, noting that the secretary had been extremely careful not to undertake any initiatives without explicit approval from the president.
A senior White House official, asserted today that Mr. Gingrich's criticism "was seen at the White House as an attack on the president, not an attack on Powell." There was widespread anger at the White House, the official said, but he declined to characterize the reaction of Mr. Bush himself.
However, the president is said by Republican politicians to have little love for Mr. Gingrich, going back to Mr. Gingrich's savage attack against Mr. Bush's father for raising taxes, a step that ignited the wrath of conservatives generally.
While dismissing Mr. Gingrich's comments, State Department officials said today that they wondered whether Mr. Gingrich might have checked with someone in the administration before launching his attack.
The former speaker serves on the Defense Policy Board along with other prominent conservatives and is known to be close to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney.
But a Pentagon spokesman said that to the best of his knowledge, no one at the Defense Department had seen Mr. Gingrich's speech or was familiar with its content ahead of time. An administration official said Mr. Cheney had also not seen the speech.
Both Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, and Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, dismissed Mr. Gingrich's remarks as misinformed and wrong. Mr. Fleischer called Mr. Powell an "able, able diplomat" who was carrying out "the president's approach" on foreign policy in a successful manner.
Nevertheless, officials acknowledged that there had been a number of tussles recently, some of them possibly because the administration's hard-liners and advocates of the war with Iraq seemed emboldened in the wake of the victory last month. Divisions between the State Department and the Pentagon have been a recurring theme in this administration, but in the period leading up to the war in Iraq there seemed to be an effort to present a united front. That unity is once again cracked.
On North Korea, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld made clear that he opposed talks with the North Korean government that began this week in Beijing. Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld circulated a memorandum proposing that China and the United States try to bring down the government of Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader. In addition, Mr. Rumsfeld unsuccessfully pushed for a more conservative State Department official, John R. Bolton, to lead the talks, administration officials said.
In Iraq, the Defense Department had initially sought to promote as the new leaders of the country a group of exiles with whom Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, had been in close contact. The Defense Department allowed military forces to move the group's leader, Ahmad Chalabi, into Iraq to help rally Iraqis behind him.
Subsequently, the White House made clear — at the request of the State Department, according to many officials — that the United States would make no effort to install any particular Iraqis in power in Baghdad.
Two other divisive issues on which Mr. Powell has been attacked by conservatives involve Syria and Israel. Mr. Powell's recent announcement that he would discuss the problem of Syria's support for terrorism and possession of dangerous weapons in Damascus with President Bashar al-Assad was criticized by Mr. Gingrich as "ludicrous."
But administration officials said today that Mr. Bush had cleared the Powell announcement and that both Mr. Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, had advocated toning down the criticism of Syria.
The administration's policies on Israel have drawn fire from many quarters, including Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, who has labeled them "diplomatic mumbo jumbo." His criticism was directed at the peace plan drafted by the United States and three partners — the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — for a staged process leading to a Palestinian state, in return for security guarantees and an end to violence against Israelis.
Administration officials said today that the plan would be published soon — now that the Palestinians have selected a prime minister — and that the approach had Mr. Bush's full support.
Mr. Powell was the administration's strongest advocate of enlisting the United Nations to support the use of force in Iraq and negotiating with France toward that end. Those negotiations failed, and Mr. Powell said this week that France would have to face unspecified "consequences" of its opposition.
Aides said today that while Mr. Powell felt strongly that France needed to be informed of American displeasure, any actions to punish France should not also punish the United States by making further cooperation impossible in Iraq or elsewhere.
Quite possible - ANYONE would have had their hands full and 100% of their time preoccupied with rooting out decades of embedded communists and socialists sympathisizers within the State Department.
Then there are those avid, die-hard U.N. advocates down in the basement...
Actually, I imagine the NY Times is making this into a much bigger deal than it actually is. If Bush is smart, he'll have intelligent advisors making their cases and then choose what makes sense for a given situation.
There are a lot of folks out there who hate Powell for whatever reason, but President Bush runs his own show without regard to the polls and the rants by professional TV talking heads. If he thought Powell needed to go Powell would be gone. And Powell is enough of the professional soldier that if he thought he was doing a poor job for his President he would resign.
So far the President seems to be pretty much pleased with Secretary Powell's performance and doesn't seem to much are what Newt or anyone else thinks.
Now that's a dead dog!
What was your dog's name?
#:>)
G'Pa Dave - what's your take on Powell? Do you trust him and does he have future political aspirations higher than the office he now holds?
Sometimes I see his as brilliant while other times I see him as pandering to the U.N.
He is a tough one to call.
This particular item reads more like an opinion piece than a news article, but then again, that's SOP for the NYTimes.
I trust your judgement, and you are likely very accurate on Powell's purpose and plans.
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