November 17, 2004 - “I have been characterized as a reluctant warrior; the general that doesn’t want to go to war. Well, you are right. Say it again. Please, write it down – ‘a reluctant general.’ I don’t want to know any generals who ain’t reluctant. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. War is a very serious matter.” Secretary of State Colin Powell – May 2004.

There is no longer a place for Colin Powell in a Bush Administration. There is no longer a function for the face of reason; for the reluctant warrior. The second term is won and there is no re-election campaign to be won. The President has collected all of the political capital he is likely to garner. He is free from the bonds of political expediency and is free to pursue a course to the place in history he chooses for himself; to build the Bush Legacy. He has no need for a reluctant warrior or a voice of reason as he tailors his cabinet for the second term.

John Ashcroft, too, has served his function as a sop to the Christian Right drawing drapes to hide statues and statutes with equal vigor. He provided the legal veneer dressing up the torture chambers at America’s concentration camps at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It was no mean task, twisting America’s rule of law to fit the arbitrary exercise of power.

It is of no little significance that these two polar opposites of the first Bush cabinet are being replaced by two West Wing operators whose function has been to justify to a skeptical public and press the repeated departures from American principles that have characterized the first Bush administration. Ashcroft is replaced by Alberto Gonzalez, the author of a learned justification of torture with an eerie echo of the Nixon doctrine that it is not illegal if the President does it.. Powell’s successor is the quintessential dead-ender, Condoleezza Rice who has publicly maintained to the ultimate moment that sooner or later we would pry evidence of WMD development and stockpiles out of the stones of Iraq. President Bush’s new man at the CIA has put it in writing. It is no longer the Agency’s mission to gather and evaluate information to assist the President in formulating policy in the national interest. It is now the Agency’s mission to marshal support for the policy decisions that the President has already made.

In the second Bush term the role of the cabinet is no longer to be players in the game. No longer will they be on the field. Now they will be lined up on the sideline waving their pom-poms and leading cheers. They will be telling us how well the game is going no matter what the scoreboard shows. There will be no reluctant warriors on the Bush team. Indeed it appears that there will be no warriors at all and nobody to tell the coach that the game plan is not working.