Colin Powell in A Matter of Character
On Foreign Policy:
Powell’s job: diplomatic solutions & disagree with Rumsfeld
Once Bush decided [to invade Iraq], he never looked back. At that point he expected his White House staff to support him, but he allowed his Cabinet officers wider latitude. “People say that Rumsfeld and Powell are at war with each other,” an aide said.
“No kidding. They’re supposed to be. The State Department’s answer to most anything is diplomacy. The Defense Department’s answer to almost anything is weapons and warfare. The question is what is the right mix of those for each situation.
You want those differences of opinion to exist in any organization, and you have this ongoing dialogue. The glue that holds it together, according to management consultants, is mutual respect. If you respect one another, you’ll find the right balance.
So do Powell and Rumsfeld respect each other? I believe they do. Are their disagreements excessive? Are they dysfunctional? I’ve never seen that.“
Source: A Matter of Character, by Ronald Kessler, p.134-35
Aug 5, 2004
On War & Peace:
Arafat must end terrorism to get to two-state solution
Bush concluded that Yasser Arafat was a hopeless case, someone who had little interest in helping his own people and who was an impediment to the peace process. Instead of pretending that he was relevant, in April and June 2002,
Bush began saying that Arafat was part of the problem.“I had warned Arafat twice that it was about to come to an end, that I could no longer deal with him if he didn’t do something about terrorism,” Powell said.
“And he didn’t, so we then came up with this twenty-fourth June speech that said we can’t work with this guy; the Palestinian Authority has to reform itself, and that has to be done quickly;
and we’ll wait for a new Palestinian Authority leadership to emerge, and we are looking for a Palestinian state, a two-state solution.”
Source: A Matter of Character, by Ronald Kessler, p.178-79
Aug 5, 2004
On War & Peace:
Bush & whole Cabinet agreed on multilateral approach on Iraq
Contrary to press reports, Bush was never opposed to obtaining UN approval for going into Iraq. “People like to write about that,” Powell said, “but when I first raised thee issue directly with the president in early August of 2002, I told the president
that if we’re going to solve this problem, there are two ways to do it: getting the broadest international coalition and concurrence, or at least authorization for it; or just doing it unilaterally, and if we did it unilaterally, we would have difficulty
getting willing partners in a coalition. And since it was UN resolutions that were being violated, I believed he had to go back to the UN.“ Bush was ”attracted to that argument, and I did,“ Powell said. ”And Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
agreed, with “varying degrees of skepticism with respect to whether the UN would play a useful role” Contrary to what the critics said, Bush supported “multilateralism and getting our friends and neighbors involved,” Powell said.
Source: A Matter of Character, by Ronald Kessler, p.180-81
Aug 5, 2004
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