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Colin Powell Resigns
Anarcho-Goth writes "It is all over the media now. Secretary of State Colin Powell has resigned 'effective at your pleasure.' He says that he only planned to hold the position for one term anyway, but I'm sure the rumor mill has other ideas. This makes 6 resignations since the election. My local TV news described it as the most important position to resign so far. Isn't Secretary of State the most important cabinet position, period? Articles from CNN, The UK Guardian, The Associated Press, and Fox News."
This was news last year. More than a year ago he said he would resign after one term. article.
The BBC provides a brief but interesting discussion of the "disengagement of Colin Powell".
Powell's replacement will - I think - send a strong signal about the strategy a Bush 43B administration will pursue.
A moderate (like one of the current favourites for the job, John Danforth, the current US ambassador to the UN... though I don't know enough about him to know if the description is accurate) will imply that there will continue to be a level of debate between the neoconservative and less revolutionary wings of the administration.
On the other hand, appointing someone like Paul Wolfowitz to the job (another name bandied about, along with that of Condoleezza Rice*), will signal a continuation and even escalation of a unilateralist, force-based foreign policy that was pretty much dictated by the Pentagon for the last four years anyway.
(*Not sure how I feel about Rice. I suspect she's not quite as extremist as she's often painted as being. She is - I think - on record as saying she's not interested in remaining in her NSA position and that she's considering a return to academia. She's also a favourite to replace Powell but appears to prefer to take over Defence rather than State. She's a doer, not a talker, and doesn't like all the pomp and ceremony associated with the foreign affairs position.)
a world in progress...
UPDATE: Being reported that National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is to replace Colin Powell as secretary of state in his second term.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
4 cabinet members, including the Secretary of State, resigned after Clinton was re-elected in 1996. A shakeup in the cabinet is standard operating procedure after an election. The world has changed (a lot) in four years. To think that the same exact people are the best ones for the job doesn't make sense.
Of course, the same thing could have been said about Bush, but we won't go there....
I wonder if many republicans are thinking that maybe they shouldn't have voted for Bush, due to what appears to be lack of confidence even within his cabinet...
- dshaw
I think you meant "Faux News".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A close/disputed election
The margin of victory this year was 34 votes. That's really not all that close. Compare to 2000. Also, this election was not remotely disputed.
with the administration massively changed between terms?
Cabinet-level officers serve at the pleasure of the president. They come and go frequently. Second-term Cabinets usually end up being very different from first-term Cabinets.
Is there any precedent for what we're seeing, and what did it mean last time?
There is extensive precedent, and all it means is that serving in the Cabinet is hard work.
I write in my journal
Ah... no. The parent post showed very little understanding of fundamentalist motivations and thought. It says that anyone who disagrees with the direction of popular culture must be motivated by fear and loathing. It's an uninformed perception designed to induce hatred and fear of anyone who happens to believe that moral values that have served civilization for thousands of years are to be trusted over more recent notions regardless of their popularity.
It means that it was a lot more fun to take over and run a country with a huge budget surplus and a military that is not slogging through a protracted insurgency in a foreign country. Remember the good old days of 2000?
With the treasury plundering complete, and insufficient resources to invade any more countries for the forseeable future, the next 4 years just aren't going to be nearly as much fun as the first 4. So, it's a good time to ditch any responsibility for trying to fix the mess and cash in with some lucrative private sector job, perhaps in lobbying or something else that allows you to convert your legacy government connections to cash.
Mod me -1, Troll, Insightful.
The Republican Party today is an uneasy coalition of the personal freedom economic laissez faire folks and the biblical literalists. They need each other to win but both pretend the other is not there.
Perhaps Secretary Powell was tired of pretending that the biblical literalist elephant was not under the table. His memoirs will be a great read.
Seriously. I saw the webcast of a speech he gave at Princeton University. It was part of a conference honoring the author of a policy called "Containment", the concept which had guided the United States against the Soviet Union during the cold war... and also the strategy used by Bush and Clinton against Saddam Hussein. Basically, it's less risky to contain the threat than to engage it head-on. It was Orwellian to see him lauding this idea, after (rather defensively) saying that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein had the "intention" to produce WMD... steadfastly defending the idiocy of Bush's policies to the end. Kinda pathetic. But it seems he's got a military man's idea of honor: do what you're told, as well as you can, and don't question orders, no matter how idiotic and insane.
I can't possibly form any intelligent opinions without spin! But for some reason it is missing. I just need two things explained about all these resignations:
1. The left needs to explain why this is proof that Bush's second term will result in the destruction of life on this and several nearby planets.
2. The right needs to explain why this is proof that Bush's second term is the second coming of Jesus and a new era of enlightenment.
All I'm seeing is reasoning and sensible conjectures! That's no fun! I want assinine extreme examples! Please help!
"My local TV news described it as the most important position to resign so far. Isn't Secretary of State the most important cabinet position, period?"
No. Common misconception. Ever since the creation of the NSC (National Security Council, AKA "The organization that is/should already be doing almost everything that the Homeland Security department has been created to do") and the beginning of the Cold War, the State Department has been diminishing in power.
The Department of Defense (renamed from "Department of War" at the same time that the NSC was created) and the CIA are in a better position to offer near-instant results, while the State Department often takes years to accomplish even simple tasks. In the climate of the Cold War, many presidents liked instant results better, and so chose to neglect the State Department. The purges of the Anti-Communism movement pressured State Dep. officials to not "rock the boat", lest they lose their jobs, and the McCarthy and others were allowed to run rampant in the State Dep. looking for "pinkos" -- however, when McCarthy went after the Def. Dep., he was crushed and swept out of the way.
Nixon's administration saw a shift change of the NSA (National Security Advisor, head of the NSC, and the postion that Condi Rice holds) to a policy-making position, and to one more powerful in the realm of foreign relations than even the SoS. Everyone knows about Kissinger, Nixon's NSA, whether or not they know what position he held, but how many people can name his Secretary of State? Far fewer, I'd wager, and in fact I'd bet that many people would mistakenly guess that Kissinger was the Sec. of State, as he assumed many of the traditional roles of that position.
The modern SoS is predominantly concerned with making sure that the Dep. of State runs smoothly, while the NSA sets policy from within the whitehouse and governs a data set much larger than that of the SoS. Knowledge is power.
So, in many ways, the NSC, DoD, and CIA are much more powerful than the SD. That said, a president can always choose to give a department more or less power than his predecessors have. Perhaps that's what we'll see happen to the State Department if Rice moves there. Otherwise, it'd be a huge step down for her.
The post election commentary in the US is divided between questioning the accuracy of the count of votes, or wondering whether the Democratic Party had to pay more attention to discussing "moral" values as part of its election activity. Outside the US, there is discussion about whether there is some social flaw in the American character that has led them to 4 more years of a George Bush Presidency.
While these considerations may provide a way to review what happened in the recent US election, they fail to raise questions that take a broader view. For example, such questions could include:
Traditionally, it is not that one can affect change in a situation unless one also tries to understand the nature of the problem. In the 2004 election, many people committed themselves to trying to replace George Bush. The call was to vote for "anyone but Bush".
Early on the Democratic Party narrowed its sights to John Kerry as the candidate. From there on, the "anyone but Bush" meant a vote for Kerry, arguing that he could realistically defeat Bush. The Democratic Party challenged the effort of Ralph Nader to provide an alternative, removing him from the ballot in whatever states possible. The Green Party decided not to campaign vigorously anywhere that the campaign might pose a threat to the election of Kerry. Several activists who had backed Nader in the 2000 election urged voters to vote for Kerry rather than Nader this time. Despite these efforts, Bush now has a second term in the White House.
One party, with two wings...
One of the problems with the 2004 election strategy of those hoping to defeat Bush, is that there was a mistaken understanding of what it means to be "realistic" in the kind of "two-party" system in the US. In a country like Germany, for example, a vote for a smaller party, like the Greens, made it possible for the Social Democratic Party to win re-election in 2002. In the US, however, such a vote, as with the Nader vote in 2000, could not be combined with the Gore vote, to give the Democratic Party the White House.
What this means, one is told, is that in the US, the votes for a candidate who is not from one of the two major political parties, are wasted votes. Thus, in the 2004 election, there was a determination to encourage a vote for the Democratic Party candidate, regardless of his position on important issues, such as the war in Iraq.
The Democratic Party in the US has a long history of deciding that it will pursue the vote of those who might otherwise vote Republican. With no external left opposition, the Democratic Party accepts the issues as the Republican Party presents them, but proposes it can implement the Republican agenda better than the Republicans will. Though this is not necessarily true on every issue, on the fundamental issues of foreign policy, and of domestic policy issues to support that foreign policy, the two parties form one party, with two wings. Essentially, in the US, on these important issues, both the Democratic or Republican Parties, will implement the same foreign policy. (For example, Clinton carried out the sanctions against Iraq and enforced the No Fly Zones. Bush then argued that his policy of invading Iraq was just a continuation o
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