And Yet... (35 page)

We have a fairly accurate picture of what this secretary thought, and did, after September 11, 2001. No serious person needs even to read between the lines of Woodward's two volumes,
Bush at War
, succeeded by the much superior
Plan of Attack.
To the annoyance of many within the administration, especially concerning the first book, Powell was to all intents and purposes being quoted firsthand.

But he was also being cited, in his own name and in real time, and in his own capacity, in public. It's true that directly after September 11, he expressed skepticism about Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz's plan for “ending states who sponsor terrorism,” and a more general skepticism about regime change, a skepticism quite
consistent with his entire political past. But he also made the most cogent presentation of any cabinet member, right in front of the UN General Assembly and the entire world, making the case that time had run out for Saddam Hussein.

Here, then, might be the nub. Powell, and his most loyal subordinate Richard Armitage, assured us in minute detail that the secretary was not content to spout any form of words handed to him. He is known to have spent many painful hours winnowing and refining that presentation. George Tenet, then the director of US central intelligence, sat conspicuously behind him as if in confirmation that the two US government agencies most doubtful about regime change were, at any rate, of one mind about the regime in question. Yet, several months later, while being interviewed by NBC journalist Tim Russert, the secretary appeared to suggest that he had been led astray by opportunistic intelligence provided through the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi: a man who was a bête noire at State and CIA for many years. One need only imagine what Dean Rusk or Adlai Stevenson might have done, had they learned too late that someone had faked or “improved” the U-2 photography over Cuba that they waved in the face of the world and shook in the face of the Soviet delegation. Resignation would have been the least of it. And somebody would have been fired (which, strangely enough in this case, nobody has).

During this same period, the Department of State had every opportunity to prove the relative superiority of diplomacy and alliance building over “saber rattling,” or whatever we agree to call it. European and other capitals could have been subject to a vast American effort of persuasion, and free media across the world could have been offered some “public diplomacy,” too. Powell inaugurated his tenure at Foggy Bottom with a speech to the staff in which he had said that he would be a friend of the diplomatic corps. He even got the president to come to the department and speak encouraging words. Yet can anyone cite any effort, by any accredited American representative overseas, to make the administration's case? And can anyone recall, without acute
embarrassment, the expensive and useless tactics of soft-core public relations and pseudo-MTV with which former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Margaret Tutwiler and others briefly attempted to boost America's “image”? So dire was this defeat, in fact, that the lack of enthusiasm or allies was used as evidence in itself that the policy must somehow be wrong.

The official historian of the State Department has calculated that Powell will have traveled less than any secretary in more than three decades. His three immediate predecessors voyaged abroad an average of 45 percent more than him. “Shuttle diplomacy” may well have been overpromoted by Henry Kissinger, but a
politique de présence
has an importance of its own, and Powell should not forget that it was very largely his own personality—large, affable, calm, and, yes, originally Caribbean—that landed him the post to begin with. I myself doubt that a diplomatic “offensive” by Powell would have melted the heart of the Élysée, but he incurs criticism not for failing, but for not trying. And then he incurs further criticism for indicating dissent from a major policy, partly on the grounds that it did not command enough sympathy overseas.

So why didn't Powell resign? The kindest explanation would seem to be that it didn't cross his mind. He assumed himself unsackable, almost certainly correctly. And he could therefore continue to have things both ways, conducting his own private diplomacy through Woodward if things didn't suit him. This experience was not exactly a first: as chairman of the joint chiefs, he had expressed himself freely on matters more properly decided by civilian authority, such as the future of Bosnia or the role of homosexuals in the military. Indeed, it's thinkable that he exerted more influence on policy when he was not secretary.

To inquire about his stand on the principle of resignation is a bit like asking whether he'd ever have deigned to run for president. Here again, he felt entitled to be flirtatious and noncommittal, keeping the voters (or rather the book buyers) guessing until he'd finished his tour with the 1995 memoir,
My American Journey.
It was in those pages,
incidentally, that he disclosed what has since become evident: “Having seen much of the world and having lived on planes for years, I am no longer much interested in travel.”

It's not only the frequency, or lack of it, in Powell's trips. It's also the duration. By July of this year, he had spent less than twenty-four hours in Sudan. He may possibly have been right that the Sudanese authorities needed to be engaged rather than isolated, condemned, and subjected to hostile pressure, in respect to their conduct in Darfur and elsewhere. (He had better have been right: even as Powell cautioned against military intervention, Slobodan Milosevic employed similar breathing spaces to carry out ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.) But how much seriousness does this level of “engagement” show?

There is, one cannot help feeling, something in Colin Powell that likes to give away the store. While bidding, not too hard, for the Chilean vote at the United Nations, he stated during a televised town hall interview that the United States had nothing to be proud of in the 1973 overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende. When the terrible revelations from the Abu Ghraib prison were published, Powell, in the course of one interview, at first denied that he had ever seen anything like it in Vietnam, and then proceeded to evoke the memory of My Lai. This writer had better come clean and agree that it was high time to make an official statement about Chile, and indeed about My Lai. But perhaps not when vote-hunting in the Chilean case.

A more solemn and considered remark at an earlier or later date might have been more dignified. And perhaps not to pile on the agony as secretary of state in the Abu Ghraib case, where there had been neither a massacre nor a proven high-level cover-up. (And perhaps especially not if, as a young officer in Vietnam—as Powell was—one had been all too willing to dismiss early reports of atrocities.)

Colin Powell reportedly became incensed on January 20, 2003, when, after many exhausting negotiations at the United Nations, he discovered from Dominique de Villepin, then the French minister of foreign affairs, that Paris thought that “nothing! nothing!” justified the armed enforcement of Resolution 1441 compelling Iraq to yield
to UN inspections. This, Powell felt, was something that he might well have been told before he wasted his time. But it is also something that he could have known before he wasted that time (and, dare one hint) the time of others, too. In a much-underreported speech to France's assembled ambassadors on August 26, 2004, the new French minister of foreign affairs Michel Barnier said that it was France that has become isolated, even “arrogant,” and that it could not flourish without allies. He was noted for not even mentioning the United States in his cautious remarks.

Thus, one might mark the end of the Powell tenure by noting that there is always room for quiet diplomacy, but by adding that “quiet diplomacy” may not necessarily involve deniable smirks and disclaimers concerning a central policy; that such smirks and disclaimers are especially unpersuasive when the policy is in trouble; that to tell the hometown paper that your rivals and critics are Communists and Nazis isn't all that “diplomatic” in any case, and that faintness and ambiguity are not the same as patience, discretion, and reticence.

(
Foreign Policy
, October 26, 2009)

A
PRIL IS THE
cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year after year, that the Turkish authorities simply deny that these appalling events ever occurred or that the killings constituted “genocide.”

In a technical and pedantic sense, the word “genocide” does not, in fact, apply, since it only entered our vocabulary in 1943. (It was coined by a scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who for rather self-evident reasons in that even more awful year wanted a legal term for the intersection between racism and bloodlust and saw Armenia as the precedent for what was then happening in Poland.) I still rather prefer the phrase used by America's then-ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Reporting to Washington about what his consular agents were telling him of the foul doings in the Ottoman provinces of Harput and Van in particular, he employed the striking words “race extermination.” (See the imperishable book
The Slaughterhouse Province
for some of the cold diplomatic dispatches of that period.) Terrible
enough in itself, Morgenthau's expression did not quite comprehend the later erasure of all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of their churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official Turkish maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in the first place.

This year, the House foreign affairs committee in Washington and the parliament of Sweden joined the growing number of political bodies that have decided to call the slaughter by its right name. I quote now from a statement in response by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey and the leader of its Islamist party:

In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.

This extraordinary threat was not made at some stupid rally in a fly-blown town. It was uttered in England, on March 17, on the Turkish-language service of the BBC. Just to be clear, then, about the view of Turkey's chief statesman: if democratic assemblies dare to mention the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the twentieth century, I will personally complete that cleansing in the twenty-first!

Where to begin? Turkish “guest workers” are to be found in great numbers all through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan's xenophobic demagoguery attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably overestimated the number of “tolerated” economic refugees from neighboring and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians as well?

The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009, he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League and with Israeli president Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well “how to kill”—which might be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he disliked the fact that the moderator—David Ignatius of the
Washington Post
—is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea that former prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan's evidently fragile composure.

In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and political consequences. The country's best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 for acknowledging Turkey's role in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.