Dick Cheney and Colin Powell: A contentious friendship and a world-defining debate

Heather Hurlburt reviewed James Mann's The Great Rift, a look at Dick Cheney and Colin Powell's relationship, for the Washington Post.

Mann’s retelling is a useful summary for those who didn’t live through the period at close range, and it offers some new nuances for those who did. His portrayal of Cheney stresses his skill at using bureaucracy and proximity to get his way, as well as his focus on unilateral U.S. power. Powell, while a far more adept public figure than Cheney, falls just short of him in bureaucratic skills and is bedeviled, in Mann’s telling, by a lack of strategic vision and decisiveness. When Powell is made aware of the decision to torture detainees, he does not speak out — and does not tell his staff. Ultimately, when he has the chance to tell Bush that he will not support an Iraq invasion, he does not do so. Instead, he delivers the administration’s justification for war on the world stage — based, as it turns out, on incorrect intelligence pushed forward by Cheney.

Mann wants his readers to know that Cheney had no post-9/11 change of heart. He documents the consistency of his deep conservatism and unilateralism across decades. Mann is less clear in explaining what became of the GOP foreign policy establishment’s talent for teamwork and realism. He seems to believe that Cheney’s unilateralism and drive for power helped provoke the fatal errors of the Iraq War, while Powell’s “passivity” prevented a meaningful challenge to the war from taking shape inside the administration. Or that is my interpretation — Mann never offers a judgment.

He walks us through the errors, misjudgments and flat-out untruths that got the United States into Iraq but can never bring himself to answer his own question of why. And though he flirts in the volume’s opening and close with an even larger question — how did the establishment that presided over the end of the Cold War and the triumphal Gulf War find itself either handmaidens or ineffectual opponents of President Trump? — he offers no answers there, either.