After Powell
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Whoever President Bush chooses to succeed Secretary of State Powell – last night the Associated Press and ABC News were quoting an administration official who said it would be Condoleezza Rice – the key to success will be whether the individual is more in tune than Mr. Powell was with the president’s own core beliefs. That could help to stem the internal debates that have prevented the Bush administration from achieving all that it otherwise might have on Iran, Iraq, and Israel. It’s not that it’s bad for differing views to be aired within an administration; such differences are better than group think. But the differences need to be resolved quickly enough to implement policies, and to do that, the right team is essential.
Mr. Powell served honorably, admirably, even, in making the public case for the Iraq war. He will be remembered by many for the dignity with which he, and he alone it was said, pulled America out of the Durban “World Conference Against Racism” when it became clear that the event was turning into a world conference against Israel. Yet one got the sense at times that Mr. Powell was either unwilling or unable to keep his department entirely on board with the president’s stated goals of spreading freedom and democracy to the Middle East. Or even, in some instances, to obey the legislated law of the land.
In the past week, Mr. Powell sent an assistant secretary of state, William Burns, to Cairo for Yasser Arafat’s funeral. In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr. Powell was asked about his deputy Richard Armitage’s statement to Congress that with respect to Iran, regime change is not American policy. Mr. Powell replied, “Regime change is not something that I’ve heard discussed, although I hear it speculated about a great deal in the papers. So what Mr. Armitage said is accurate.” The Associated Press quotes the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, who was an ambassador at the United Nations during the Clinton administration, as saying of Mr. Powell, “Hopefully, his replacement will be a pragmatist rather than an ideologue.”
If we had to choose, we’d prefer an ideologue to a pragmatist, because the ideas that Mr. Bush has sent his state secretary out to promote – freedom and democracy – are those in which we, along with a lot of other Americans, believe. And as Natan Sharansky explains in his new book, “The Case for Democracy,” and as Mr. Bush successfully argued on the campaign trail, spreading freedom and democracy abroad have important pragmatic advantages for America, because their presence increases American security. The real ideologues – that is, the ones who let their fixed ideas stand in the way of principles, good policy, and American law – are those at the State Department who, on Mr. Powell’s watch, have been blocking the execution of American law.
Consider the move of the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, which the State Department is refusing, in defiance of the legislated will of the American people. The embassy move is clearly required by the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, whose waiver provisions apply only to the financial penalties on the State Department for not making the move, not to the move itself. The State Department also refuses to enforce the law requiring it to list on passports “Jerusalem, Israel” as the birthplace of those born in Israel’s capital, if they so request it. The laws clearly requiring this are the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for fiscal year 2003 and the Consolidated Appropriations Resolutions of 2003. The ideologues are the same ones who maneuvered against the Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmad Chalabi during the time when Mr. Chalabi was urging better planning in the runup to the Iraq War.
What Mr. Bush needs in a secretary of state is someone who will focus more on representing America to the rest of the world than on representing the State Department to the rest of the Bush administration. Mr. Powell in the end, like all state secretaries, has done a bit of both. Mr. Powell himself made this clear yesterday both in his resignation letter, when he said he had been pleased to have been part of a team that “liberated the Afghan and Iraqi people” and in his remarks, when he said that “the greatest privilege” he had over the past four years had been to be “the leader of tens of thousands of wonderful employees of this Department, whether they’re Civil Servants, Foreign Service Officers, management specialists, Foreign Service Nationals, who work so hard on the front lines of freedom and the front lines of our foreign policy, who are at risk every single day and serve our nation so proudly.”
Many of them no doubt are fine public servants, and they do put themselves at risk. But the foreign policy of this country, under the Constitution, is set at the White House and the Congress, a point Mr. Bush will need to see enforced by Ms. Rice or by whoever succeeds Mr. Powell.