The Powell What-Ifs

That Colin Powell was unceremoniously dumped from his post as secretary of state after the 2004 election has been definitively established in the past few days not just by Bob Woodward, but by Karen DeYoung -- also a senior editor at The Washington Post, and also out with a new book.

Judging from the excerpt which ran in The Washington Post Magazine over the weekend, DeYoung's book, "Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell," raises a host of what-if questions.

What if Powell hadn't been such a "good soldier"? What if he'd been more willing to speak the truth? What if he hadn't let himself be manipulated by Vice President Cheney and suckered by bad intelligence? What if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been forced to resign, instead of him? What if Powell had gone public with his concerns about Iraq, before or after the invasion? What if he'd resigned in protest?

DeYoung doesn't appear to answer those questions, but her evocative insider chronicle offers striking evidence that throughout Powell's tenure, he was on the losing side of the battle for the president's ear, listlessly urging moderation as three powerful and implacable foes -- Cheney, Rumsfeld and political guru Karl Rove -- drove foreign policy into the wall.

Sunday's excerpt centers around Powell's great humiliation: His February 2003 avowal before the United Nations of a case for war in Iraq that turned out to be a pack of lies.

Powell tells DeYoung it could have been worse. He spent much of the five days he had before his presentation "trimming the garbage" that Cheney's staff had provided him as evidence of Iraqi WMD and ties to al Qaeda.

But as DeYoung chronicles, even that process occurred under the watchful eye of such Cheney henchmen as Scooter Libby, John Hannah and Stephen Hadley.

Perhaps that's why it failed.

A few choice passages from DeYoung's book: "Time and time again during the administration's bumpy first year, Powell had seen Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney intervene to nudge a willing Bush away from moderation and diplomacy, and toward a hard line on foreign policy issues from North Korea to the Middle East. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda on New York and Washington, their attention turned sharply toward Iraq, and by the following summer it was clear that the administration was headed toward war with Saddam Hussein."

Later she writes: "There was a widespread belief among the secretary's loyal aides -- privately shared by Powell himself, although he brushed it off as meaningless political gamesmanship in conversations with them -- that both White House political adviser Karl Rove and Cheney had actively plotted to undermine him for the past three years."

In an interview in 2004, Powell "criticized a persistent White House machismo that took aim at 'anything . . . that suggests any weakness in the [administration's] position,' regardless of common sense. That, and what he saw as a never-ending effort to humble him personally."

In her Live Online yesterday, DeYoung wrote: "Political handlers surrounding Bush, led by Karl Rove, never trusted Powell. He was too popular and too independent. Cheney distrusted him for the same reasons, and he and Rumsfeld both felt Powell was part of the 'old' military and a political moderate--two things that were not part of their plans for the country and its armed forces."