Knives sharpen for Powell, the 'double loser'

"War is always a failure," runs the French mantra as the clock ticks towards a US-led invasion of Iraq. In that case, war is always a failure of diplomacy. Small wonder then that fingers are being pointed at the man in charge of US diplomacy, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

Yesterday, it should be said, there was scant whiff of failure in the air at the State Department, as General Powell appeared before the press to perform the funeral rites of Iraq diplomacy, minutes after the debacle in New York had been sealed when Britain, America and Spain withdrew their joint resolution to the UN.

The Secretary of State was measured. France again was singled out as the guilty party. He was "disappointed" at events, but Saddam Hussein, he asserted, was "guilty of all charges". And he had no regrets at not having done things differently. Proudly, he pointed to resolution 1441, whose unanimous passage last November in retrospect appears the high water mark for Colin Powell in this Iraq crisis.

But Washington is a cruel place. When an administration faces a decision as fraught as this, hardly has the outcome been settled than the post-mortems begin. This time, the instant verdict (possibly to be amended) is that General Powell, once regarded as a beacon of moderation of this administration, its best-liked and most trusted spokesman abroad, is the loser.

He is a loser in a double sense. The obvious defeat lies in his insistence that the President go the UN route. From the outset, Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, said that would entrap Washington in a diplomatic web. They have been proved right, as 1441 has been revealed for what it was from the outset, an agreement to disagree.

On the weekend television talk shows, the battle was subtly replayed. Mr Cheney seemed mildly amused by France's role, perhaps because he had never been bothered by what the UN might or might not do. But General Powell mentioned France a dozen times, his usually affable features reflecting a suppressed fury at how Paris had scuppered chances of achieving a multilateral solution.

America is accustomed to getting its way, so why had it not this time? Might it be because General Powell had not done the spadework? Some say he has travelled so little in person to Europe and elsewhere in the past few months, to sell the Bush case to doubtful publics (as the far more embattled Tony Blair has done in Britain). But yesterday the general said phone and conference-call diplomacy offered the "biggest bang for the time", and noted that he had met Security Council foreign ministers several times in New York.

As war looms, the Bush administration is presenting the familiar face of unity to the world, and General Powell is a loyal trooper. But privately the Secretary of State has been been furious at the diplomatic blunderings of Mr Rumsfeld. And privately he might be wondering how much longer he is for this administration, once the Iraqi dust has settled.