A TRUE CONSERVATIVE? :

The Left and Right Have The Secretary All Wrong (James Mann, September 1, 2002, Washington Post)

Powell has been, throughout his career, a proponent of a strong national defense, an extensive military presence overseas and, more generally, a unique American role in the world. He supported the Star Wars program in the 1980s and resisted relaxing the ban on gays in the military in the 1990s. His spectacular military career took him steadily from officers training at City College of New York to four-star general. Yet as he readily acknowledges, most of the key steps in his separate, parallel rise through Washington's foreign policy establishment were in Republican administrations. He was introduced to future Republican leaders as a White House fellow under Richard Nixon, became national security adviser under Reagan and was named chairman of the Joint Chiefs under George H.W. Bush.

Powell served comfortably as the loyal military aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, the most hawkish Cabinet member of that Reagan administration and the architect of unprecedented increases in the defense budget. "To Weinberger and Reagan we owe the resurgence of the United States as a respected and credible military power," Powell later wrote. (What eventually became the "Powell doctrine" for caution in the use of force is an updated version of what was then called the Weinberger doctrine: U.S. troops should be sent into conflict only when vital U.S. interests are at stake, where there is strong public support, where the objectives are clearly defined and limited, and where overwhelming force is used to accomplish the objective.) After his military retirement, Powell turned down offers to become Clinton's secretary of state, primarily because he felt more in tune with the Republicans than with the Democrats on foreign policy.

Certainly, Powell behaves like a liberal on domestic social issues, such as affirmative action and gun control (on both matters, he has been more forthright in his support than many Democratic politicians). And since the mid-1990s, Powell's skepticism about military intervention -- especially his reluctance to commit U.S. troops to the Balkans -- has made him the bane of the neoconservatives, who favor a more assertive American role in promoting democracy and human rights.

Yet over the years, the right wing has displayed some ambivalence about Powell. Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official whose staunch pro-defense views put him at the far right of the political spectrum, recalls ruefully what happened when he agreed to argue against Powell's presidential candidacy on a 1995 television talk show about Powell's record on defense and foreign policy issues. Gaffney forgot to ask who would be on the pro-Powell side of the debate. When he arrived at the studio the next morning, he discovered his mentor, former boss and fellow hawk Richard Perle, glowering at him; Perle was there to defend Powell's record on national security.

If you can't trust Richard Perle's judgment then there's no one in Washington you can trust (which I acknowledge is a possibility). What's interesting is that Powell's reluctance to use force anywhere may make him the most classically conservative member of the foreign policy team. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 3, 2002 4:22 PM