The tragedy of Colin L. Powell

"Woodward describes a relationship between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell -- never close despite years of working together -- that became so strained that Cheney and Powell are barely on speaking terms. Cheney engaged in a bitter and eventually winning struggle over Iraq with Powell, an opponent of war who believed Cheney was obsessed with trying to establish a connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network and treated ambiguous intelligence as fact.

"Powell felt Cheney and his allies -- his chief aide, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith and what Powell called Feith's 'Gestapo' office -- had established what amounted to a separate government. The vice president, for his part, believed Powell was mainly concerned with his own popularity and told friends at a private dinner he hosted a year ago to celebrate the outcome of the war that Powell was a problem and 'always had major reservations about what we were trying to do.

"Before the war with Iraq, Powell bluntly told Bush that if he sent U.S. troops there 'you're going to be owning this place.' Powell and his deputy and closest friend, Richard L. Armitage, used to refer to what they called 'the Pottery Barn rule' on Iraq -- 'you break it, you own it,' according to Woodward.

"But, when asked personally by the president, Powell agreed to present the U.S. case against Hussein at the United Nations in February, 2003 -- a presentation described by White House communications director Dan Bartlett as 'the Powell buy-in.' Bush wanted someone with Powell's credibility to present the evidence that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- a case the president had initially found less than convincing when presented to him by CIA deputy director John McLaughlin at a White House meeting on December 21, 2002."