WASHINGTON - Monday's announcement
that Secretary of State Colin Powell, by far the most
popular of US President George W Bush's war cabinet, has
submitted his resignation marks the formal launch of a
new scramble for top national-security posts that could
bring an even more hardline configuration to power.
Bush was
expected to announce his nomination of Condoleezza Rice,
currently his national security adviser, as Powell's replacement.
Powell's disappearance will remove the most
influential foreign-policy moderate - and the greatest
skeptic about the use of military force - from the
administration's top ranks, thus strengthening the
hardline coalition - led by Vice President Dick Cheney -
of aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives and the
Christian Right that dominated policymaking after the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and
the Pentagon.
Powell's resignation, which will
take effect only when a successor is confirmed by the
Senate, will almost certainly be followed by that of his
deputy and best friend, Richard Armitage, thus opening
up another powerful slot in the foreign-policy
bureaucracy.
The most prominently mentioned possible nominee
besides Rice to succeed Powell had been
Washington's United Nations ambassador, former senator
John Danforth, a patrician Republican and ordained
Anglican priest with little foreign-policy experience.
Both Rice and Danforth are considered relatively easy marks for
hardliners, whose gusto and talent for bureaucratic
infighting are well established. Neither has anything
close to Powell's political standing or public
credibility; nor does either one have the connections to
the military brass that sometimes enabled Powell, a
former chairman of the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff,
to circumvent the Pentagon's civilian leadership.
Rice, who does have the advantage of a close
personal relationship with Bush that Powell never
established, was widely criticized during the first term
for failing to enforce discipline on the various
agencies, while Danforth, whose tenure as Bush's special
envoy to Sudan was described as almost entirely
"ornamental" by one insider, is considered a hands-off
manager of the "old school" who has little patience for
the nitty-gritty of policy, let alone policymaking.
Although Rice has talked frequently
about returning to academic life, she is widely believed
to want the job currently held by Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, who, however, reportedly wants to hang on
for at least another year. Some observers believe Rice will
be willing to go to the State Department if she has
first shot at the Defense Department when Rumsfeld
retires.
A Soviet military specialist by
training and experience, Rice was first recommended to
Bush by his father's national security adviser, retired
General Brent Scowcroft. But Scowcroft, who also helped
mentor Powell, quickly became disillusioned with his
protege when she sided more with the hardliners after
September 11 than with Powell, tilting the balance of
power within the administration strongly in Cheney's
favor.
Scowcroft and other "realists" have also
been deeply disappointed by Rice's failure to coordinate
the policymaking process effectively and then enforce
discipline on all agencies to ensure that policy is
being followed. In several instances, for example, the
Pentagon is known to have deliberately stymied or
ignored policy decisions with respect to China, Iran and
Iraq, with impunity.
The administration's
realist critics have held out hope that Bush may yet
appoint one of their own to take Powell's place - either
the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, or Nebraska Senator Chuck
Hagel. Both men, however, voiced strong public criticism
of US policy in Iraq during the election campaign,
angering Cheney in particular.
"Cheney looks to
be at least as powerful in this term as in the last," a
Republican congressional aide told IPS on Monday. "He
thinks that dissent is disloyalty."
While
Powell's resignation was long anticipated, the context
of Monday's announcement - particularly recent turmoil
at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) - makes it more charged. On Friday, CIA deputy
director John McLaughlin announced his retirement, which
he insisted was "a purely personal decision".
But on Monday, the agency's two top
clandestine-service officers also announced their
retirements, after a weekend filled with charges and
counter-charges regarding tensions between the career
staff and the management team brought in by new CIA
director, former Republican representative Porter Goss,
who took over in July from George Tenet.
Their
departure followed that of Michael Scheuer, a
clandestine officer who ran the CIA's office that
tracked terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the late
1990s. In a best-selling book published last summer,
Scheuer had strongly criticized the US invasion of Iraq
as a diversion from the larger "war on terrorism".
Tenet, widely seen as a Powell ally in
inter-agency debates, left the agency after a series of
congressional committee reports that found serious
failures in the agency's performance, particularly as it
related to Iraq, and Goss was reportedly given a mandate
to institute major reforms.
While the
resignations were depicted by some as the result of
personal and professional vendettas carried out by
Goss's staff, including several who formerly served in
mid-level positions at the CIA, other reports indicated
it was part of a much broader political house-cleaning.
"The agency is being purged on instructions from
the White House," one "former senior CIA official" told
Newsday on Sunday. "Goss was given instructions ... to
get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The
CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of
liberals and people who have been obstructing the
president's agenda," the official was quoted as saying.
That interpretation was bolstered by two blasts
from prominent neo-conservative writers, who charged
that high-ranking CIA officials were responsible for a
series of leaks damaging to both the administration and
Goss.
"It is time to reassert harsh authority so
CIA employees know they must defer to the people who win
elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout
off about their contempt of the White House, so they do
not go around to their counterparts from other nations
and tell them to ignore American policy," wrote New York
Times columnist David Brooks.
Neo-conservatives
in particular have long sought thoroughgoing purges of
both the State Department, particularly its Near East
Bureau, and the CIA, arguing that both have been too
optimistic about the intentions of Washington's foreign
enemies, especially Arabs.
In a book, An End
to Evil, published almost a year ago, arch-hawk and
former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle
called on Bush to replace career officers in the State
Department, the CIA and even the National Security
Council (NSC) with political appointees.
Thus
neo-conservatives are currently promoting Perle protege
Danielle Pletka, a vice president of the American
Enterprise Institute and outspoken and unapologetic
supporter of the Likud-led government in Israel, for the
post of assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern
affairs to replace career diplomat William Burns when he
moves on early next year.
Depending on who takes
Powell's place, Pletka's appointment would clearly
suggest a purge was under way. Observers note that it
was Rice who appointed Elliott Abrams, another strong
Likud supporter, to the top Mideast spot on the NSC in
December 2002.
If Rice does indeed take Powell's
place, she is likely to be succeeded by one of four
possible candidates: her current deputy, Stephen Hadley;
Cheney's powerful neo-conservative national security
adviser, I Lewis Libby; Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz; or the ultra-unilateralist Under Secretary of
State for Arms Control and International Security John
Bolton, who is also being touted as a possible deputy
secretary of state.
If Danforth were moved to
State, on the other hand, Bolton, who served briefly as
assistant secretary for international organizations
under the current president's father George H W Bush,
might be sent to the United Nations. Bolton is best known
in Washington for his hostility to multilateral
institutions, especially the UN.
