When President George W. Bush asked Colin Powell if the United States should invade Iraq in 2003 and overthrow dictator Saddam Hussein, the secretary of state and former general refused to give a straight answer.
“I didn’t say to him, ‘I oppose this war,’” Powell says in a book published today about U.S. foreign policy after the Cold War. “Because it wouldn’t have worked.”
That admission sheds light on Bush’s decision to launch the war that defined his presidency. Powell acknowledged his muted opposition in James Mann’s new book, The Great Rift, an account of how Powell’s rivalry with Vice President Dick Cheney “defined an era.”
A longtime journalist whose reporting credentials include the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, Mann, 74, has written bestselling and award-winning books, including Rise of the Vulcans: A History of Bush’s War Cabinet. In this latest work, he shows how the friendship between Powell and Cheney turned to enmity and how the conflict between them shaped America’s place in the world and its internal political debates.
In The Great Rift, Mann reveals that Powell allowed the most consequential decision of Bush’s presidency to take place without a real fight.
“It’s true, there was no meeting,” Powell said when asked if the National Security Council had a serious debate about invading Iraq. “I cannot tell you when he crossed the Rubicon.”
American policymakers in both parties agreed on the need for regime change in Baghdad in 1998, when Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act and President Bill Clinton signed it into law. The policy took priority after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as Cheney maintained that the U.S. should launch a preemptive strike on an aggressive dictator who was thought to possess weapons of mass destruction. Even Cheney struggled to make the argument for the conflict, though, according to Mann.
“What is the case?” the vice president asked at a May 2002 meeting. “Is the case strong enough to justify our military actions? Is the case strong enough for our allies to join us?”
Powell opposed the idea of the war from the outset but never “summoned forth the intensity” of his opposition during the decision-making process, according to the book. Powell hesitated to show the depth of his opposition even when Bush summoned him for “a fateful meeting” about the path forward.
“What I said to him was, ‘The United Nations is the offended party. So, if we can avoid a war, we should avoid this war. I’m all for trying to avoid this war,’” Powell said, recalling the advice he gave Bush over dinner in August of 2002.
That tepid response shows that Powell’s strategic thinking was devoted to bureaucratic conflicts, the book suggests.
“In 2002, as secretary of state, Powell was once again carefully raising warnings about an invasion of Iraq, while at the same time seeming to keep his options open to support the war in the future and stand among the victors if it succeeded,” Mann writes.
And so Bush didn’t receive Powell’s best advice. “The president sometimes had difficulty gauging the extent of Colin’s dissatisfaction,” Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, recalled in the book.
Powell worried that “if he came out against the war and his opposition became known, all American efforts to win the support of allies would collapse,” Mann writes. The book suggests that Powell’s ambition also influenced his actions at the time.
“Powell wanted to preserve his influence with the administration and his relationship with Bush,” Mann writes. “If he had opposed the war directly, he almost certainly would have had to resign.”
Mann notes that Bush could be swayed by resignation threats, as then-FBI Director Robert Mueller would prove during a different controversy related to counterterrorism surveillance policies, “but Powell was not the sort of person who resigns; he had been an inside player for most of his career.”
