Politics: So Goes the Hatchet Job

Colin Powell's days at State are numbered, and no frank-faced denials can reverse that simple fact. Read today's telling story in the Washington Post about the plan for Defense Policy Board member Newt Gingrich to savage the State Department in a speech before a conservative think tank today, doing the wetwork that Rumsfeld commands, regardless of the impact on the United States.

The State Department has a long history of handling America's affairs in a manner that kept us largely out of trouble (and wars) and protected the interests of America and her citizens. Often, the execution of this mission relied on long-range vision instead of greedy short-term motivations. For this reason, the Department of Defense will set its sights on Foggy Botton, determined to launch a proxy war against which Colin Powell is too out-manned and classy to respond. (Remember the Powell Doctrine: Respond with overwhelming force only when you can win; the State Department hasn't had the force to respond and win since he took his oath.)

Instead, like his own descent into obscurity writ large, the State Department will become what Rumsfeld, Perle, Cheney (remember the SecState during the first Gulf War? I didn't think so, and that's how Dick likes it), and Wolfowitz have long envisioned: the weak, in-name-only diplomacy office inside the vast, powerful and forcefully destructive Department of Defense.

Count up the losses: The Iraq war in general? DoD all the way. The battle to involve the UN? A draw, but DoD won the tie breaker. The fight to avoid crowning Ahmed Chalabi the next King of Iraq? DoD, without much of a struggle.

But Gingrich sees these as losses for America, not just the State Department. To this end, he wants the State Department to be scrutinized in Congressional hearings, overhauled and reorganized.

At the heart of many of the disputes are complaints by conservatives inside and outside the administration that the State Department bureaucracy is thwarting President Bush from carrying out a forceful agenda to stop terrorism and confront enemy states -- a point that former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a member of a Pentagon advisory committee who is close to Rumsfeld, plans to make in a speech this morning at the American Enterprise Institute.

Gingrich said he plans to call for major overhaul of the State Department, including hearings on Capitol Hill and an examination of the department by a task force of retired foreign service officers. He said he wanted to contrast the success of a transformed Defense Department with the "failure of State," which he described as "six months of diplomatic failure followed by one month of military success now to be returned to diplomatic failure to exploit the victory fully."

Gingrich, in an interview, said, "The story of diplomatic defeat is a bigger and more profound story" than the U.S. military victory. Among other things, he cited the failure to win Turkey's approval to accept U.S. troops, the French campaign against the war and the inability to win a U.N. resolution authorizing force.

The diplomatic efforts before the war were a period of "unrelenting defeat," Gingrich said. "For 120 days we were losing ground worldwide."

It goes without saying that this process will end up with Colin Powell taking home a box of mementos and some ordained-by-the-DoD former general with at least one documented statement providing irony (a la Spencer Abraham's vote two years before he took over the agency to abolish the Department of Energy) taking his seat in Foggy Bottom.

What's most terrifying about this process is that America is already tired of it. Taking a page from the playbooks of the Soviet Politboro and Mao's Party politics, this administration has built a mythology of failure for the State Department by asking it to perform unbelievable, unreasonable and impossible tasks. "Rove says we need to attack Iraq or we'll lose in 2004. Get me international backing." Is anybody surprised that the coalition of the willing was so lame and bought-off?

Of course not. And nobody will be surprised when Powell makes the hard decision. Keep taking the beatings or go home and stay. I think he's heading home soon.