{"id":1656,"date":"2006-10-26T15:50:42","date_gmt":"2006-10-26T19:50:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1656"},"modified":"2006-10-26T15:50:42","modified_gmt":"2006-10-26T19:50:42","slug":"the-bush-whisperer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1656","title":{"rendered":"The Bush Whisperer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Good Soldier<\/strong>
\nBy Joseph Lelyveld<\/a><\/p>\n

Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell<\/em><\/strong>
\nby Karen DeYoung
\nKnopf, 610 pp., $28.95<\/p>\n

Sometimes, while still at the State Department, he’d rail against a “broken” apparatus for policymaking; on other occasions, he’d blame his frustration on Cheney, who had practically unlimited access to Bush. (Again, here’s DeYoung paraphrasing her subject: “The president tended to pay most attention to the last person to whisper in his ear, Powell thought, and that person was usually Cheney.”) The Cheney he’d thought he knew, thought he could handle, was now under the influence of what Powell derided as “the JINSA crowd,” a reference to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a Washington think tank that saw Israel as a key military ally rather than a party to a dispute that the United States had a responsibility to broker. (Cheney, in fact, had served on the institute’s advisory board along with Douglas Feith, the number-three man in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.)<\/p>\n

The recurring thump of the Vice President’s sharp elbows becomes a leitmotif. On one occasion, when Powell called over to Bush’s staff to say he was hastening to the White House to write some diplomatic language into a letter on the Kyoto treaty that was about to be dispatched to Capitol Hill, Cheney hand-carried the letter himself up to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue before the secretary could go to work on it. On another, Cheney dictated an ultimatum to Turkey to a desk officer at State, ordering him to transmit it without showing it to his boss. Another time he and Bush drafted new instructions to the ambassador at the North Korea talks without bothering to tell their top diplomat that they’d substituted their directive for his. Powell had to assume these slights were intended to put him in his place.<\/p>\n

Three times in the space of fifteen months the President declared his commitment to finding a path to peace for Israel and the Palestinians. “I expect results,” he said in April 2002, having just called on Israel to freeze its settlements and halt incursions into Palestinian territory. Three months later he promised that the United States would “actively lead” an effort to get a “final status agreement” between the two sides by 2005. A year later, at Sharm-el-Sheik, he offered what he termed “my commitment that I will expend the effort and energy necessary to move the process forward.” Each time the words were hardly out of his mouth before the effort faltered, leaving his secretary of state in the embarrassing position of having to explain why. The first round was humiliating for Powell. Bush gave him a Rose Garden send-off to Israel, then changed his marching orders. Almost daily Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, was on the phone, passing along White House objections to something he’d said, telling him what he could not say. They were “ten of the most miserable days of my life,” Powell tells DeYoung.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Good Soldier By Joseph Lelyveld Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung Knopf, 610 pp., $28.95 Sometimes, while still at the State Department, he’d rail against a “broken” apparatus for policymaking; on other occasions, he’d blame his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-qI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}