BRET STEPHENS: Colin Powell, a study in America's 'what ifs'
Thursday, Oct. 21, 2021 -- In the game of historical "what ifs," it's worth imagining what might have been if Colin Powell -- who in the early 1990s was among the most admired figures in America -- had heeded conservative pleas to seek the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, won it and then defeated Bill Clinton that November.
Posted — UpdatedIn the game of historical “what ifs,” it’s worth imagining what might have been if Colin Powell — who in the early 1990s was among the most admired figures in America — had heeded conservative pleas to seek the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, won it and then defeated Bill Clinton that November.
Our first Black president would have been a Republican.
He would also have been the first president since Andrew Jackson to be a child of immigrants — living proof that a country that opens its doors to impoverished strangers is immeasurably enriched by their aspirations and efforts.
The Monica Lewinsky scandal, which so embittered, disgusted and polarized the country, would (at most) have been a disturbing story about a sleazy ex-president.
The Gingrich Republicans, forerunners to the truculent populists who would elect Donald Trump 20 years later, could have been held in check by a president whose moderate instincts, military bearing and public standing recalled Dwight Eisenhower.
The bitter contest over the election of 2000 — its outcome determined by the Supreme Court — would almost certainly not have happened. The country might have entered the 21st century with more sobriety and less division.
The fight against Islamist extremism that would have confronted Powell in a likely second term would have played out very differently abroad and at home.
The attacks of Sept. 11 shattered a decade’s worth of American complacency about its place atop the global order at the supposed end of history. The administration’s response to the attacks shattered whatever hopes Powell might have had to be the dominant figure in the Bush administration.
(As for political infighting, it’s worth remembering that Powell effectively protected his friend and deputy, Richard Armitage, by remaining publicly silent when he knew that Armitage had leaked inadvertently the name of the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame to the press.)
As it is, Powell did have a long private conversation with Bush, outlining the real challenge of invasion: A broken postwar Iraq would be America’s to pay for and fix. That was the right advice, and it called for meticulous planning for the day after Saddam’s downfall.
Yet Powell’s performance as secretary also reflected both the virtues and limitations of the system that had embraced him and that he came to embody for both better and worse.
In this sense, Powell uniquely synthesized two strains of American identity that had long been at odds: the radical promise of 1776, that all of us, irrespective of background, are indeed created equal and can rise as far as our talents will take us; and the sturdy traditionalism that goes with being the product of a military hierarchy.
But things went badly wrong with America’s systems between the time they had shaped Powell on his way up and the time he had a hand in shaping them from the top. Immigration processes became incoherent. Public education deteriorated. Social mobility stagnated.
Within the federal government, the intelligence community had become catastrophically inept. In Iraq, the United States could not get the lights to go on. In Afghanistan, it could not competently disburse foreign aid. At least until David Petraeus took charge, the military seemed hapless in the face of the rising insurgency. At almost every level of authority, bureaucracy got in the way of initiative, process in the way of speed, consensus in the way of independent thinking.
Again, Powell was not responsible for this. But the same combination of decency, levelheadedness and ambivalence that dissuaded him from running for president prevented him from being the kind of critic and reformer that a broken system really needed.
“A modest man who has much to be modest about” was Winston Churchill’s reputed jibe about his successor, Clement Attlee. Powell, by contrast, was a modest man who, for all of his achievements, was still too modest for his country’s good.
General Powell, you should’ve run in ’96. Rest in peace.
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