The Powell "Mission"

The Nobel Terrorist Meets The Secretary of Squish

The lead paragraph from this NY Times editorial just confounds me:

It is not easy to judge how much Secretary of State Colin Powell has accomplished in his three days in Israel. At this bloody moment in the Middle East, optimism would be unfounded. Nonetheless, the only path out of this violent morass will come from the kind of sustained, clear-eyed, top-level guidance that Mr. Powell has brought to the region, and there are glimmers of progress.

I happen to think Powell's "mission" is a major flop, and that this wishful op-ed could have been produced by a serious newspaper confirms it for me. I think the "mission" obscures what had been moral clarity and leadership from Bush on the war on terror and reinforces the standard State Department response to the Middle East (when this Administration once appeared to be much better than that).

So now we have moved from conventional wisdom that the Powell mission was a necessary evil at best (I do not concur with that, btw) to liberals proclaiming that it was not only necessary, but that such maneuvers are a "clear-eyed" model for American statecraft! The Washington Post will no doubt follow this lead, and so will other influential major media. And once again Bush will be urged away from his "black-white" view of the world towards the grays that enlightened publications like the NY Times and WaPo see all around us.

That will be a consequence of sending Powell to the Middle East to visit the Nobel Terrorist (when a lower level emissary like Zinni would have been more than enough), and it will make it that much harder for Mr. Bush to do the right thing, which (to his credit) he often seems inclined to do.

[Posted at 17:12 CST on 04/15/02] [Link]