Powell Resigns, Hatemongers Win

Everybody is announcing that Secretary of State Powell is resigning. Andrea Kopple had it right over the weekend that he was leaving.

Powell was the voice of reason in the Administration. So, no more voice of reason. The wild men (and wild women, e.g., Condi Rice) are in charge. The CIA is in total disarray (see my previous post); so, forget foreign policy for a few months. Rummy and Wolfowitz will have to take care of it, and will no doubt be happy to do so.

The sad thing for the State Department is losing a leader who actually cared about the troops. Most Secretaries of State have been politicians or lawyers who love the policy issues and meeting and greeting all the heads of state, but who usually care less about the staffers who work for them. As a general who cared about his troops in the Army, Powell brought the same concern for his troops when he came to State. His attention has been great for State Department morale, even if he lost a lot of important policy debates with the White House. The new Bush Administration will definitely be poorer for his departure.

Maybe Bush will name someone moderate with high personal character to the position, but it seems unlikely. It's most likely to be another hate-filled weasel like the other advisers surrounding Bush.

Total Disarray at the CIA

Two sides of a bitter partisan argument appeared in Saturday's Washington Post and the New York Times. The Washington Post reports that new CIA Director Porter Goss' deputy, Patrick Murray, has offended most of the senior officials at CIA, prompting the resignation and/or firing of the former deputy director and acting director John McLaughlin, along with the Deputy Director for Operations (spying) Stephen R. Kappes (more or less #3 at the agency), and Kappes' deputy, Mike Sulick. I served with Mike Sulick, but I've been retired so long that I didn't even know that Sulick was the #2 in the operations directorate, much less that he was one of the main players in this contratemps.

On the other side, David Brooks writes a vicious op-ed article in Saturday's NYT accusing the CIA of being disloyal to the President. The unusual venom in Brooks' column must mean that there is some serious hatred in this dispute. He said, "Langley was engaged in slowmotion, brazen insuborination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.... If we lived in a primative age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes."

What is not clear is whether the CIA officers legitimately believe that they were misused by the Administration, starting with the intelligence used as a basis for the war with Iraq, and are now being fired for what the Administration did. Maybe the CIA was incompetent, or maybe the Administration misused intelligence information and then blamed the CIA when things went bad.

Both Nixon (with Watergate) and Reagan (with Iran-Contra) discovered to their shame that it's difficult to do dirty business with the CIA. Maybe the CIA will turn out to be a thorn in the side of Bush II's second term, too.

Another bad thing is that legislation on reforming the intelligence community per recommendations of the 9/11 Commission is pending in Congress. This dust-up promises to confuse that issue as well.

Will Powell Stay at State?

On CNN's "On the Story" program this morning, Andrea Koppel said that Secretary Powell had said something recently that hinted that he might be leaving. Since this interview with Maria Bartiromo is one of the most recent, this might be the line:

• MS. BARTIROMO: Are you planning to announce imminently that you're stepping down, sir.
• SECRETARY POWELL: Whenever something is to be announced, it will be announced, and it is a matter for the President and I to discuss and decide.

To construe that as saying he's leaving is reading a lot into it, although it is not a straightforward statement that he will stay.

Powell Says Troops Are Adequately Compensated

As if to reply to my post on November 9, Secretary of State Powell said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo for the Wall Street Journal on November 13 that he thought US troops were adequately compensated. The interview said:

• MS. BARTIROMO: Certainly the group of people who have really been paying the price for this war have been our soldiers on the front lines. We had Ben Stein, who is a supporter of yours, supporter of the Administration and a supporter of the war, on the program recently, and he was upset about what we -- at the way we compensate our soldiers.
  Do you think that we pay them appropriately?
• SECRETARY POWELL: Can you ever pay a soldier enough for putting his or her life at risk and perhaps losing his or her life? Can you ever compensate a family adequately for that kind of sacrifice? Not really. But we do a pretty good job. We have benefits available for our soldiers in case they are injured or lost in battle, and with respect to their salaries, it's a volunteer force so what we have to do is go out into the marketplace and recruit people and we have to pay them a salary that will cause them to volunteer to come into the Army. We're in a market system with respect to our military, and so the entry level salaries are competitive with what they might get in a similar capacity -- not quite identical but similar capacity -- in civilian life.
• And the fact of the matter is we're meeting our recruiting goals and we meet our reenlistment goals, so we are paying a wage that allows us to do that. Is it adequate? Would I like to see soldiers get paid more? All the time.