But when George W. Bush asked him to take the post nearly a decade later, Mr. Powell jumped at the opportunity. He had known Mr. Bush, whom he had called “Sonny,” when his father was president. But he had only passing acquaintance with Mr. Bush before the 2000 campaign. Indeed, many political advisers in the Bush campaign were initially wary of the appointment because Mr. Powell had initially indicated that he might support the candidacy of his old friend, Senator John McCain, in 2000.
Mr. Powell took the job at Foggy Bottom without having extensive conversations with Mr. Bush about his views and what the president expected. In the first few months of the new administration, he was forced to reverse his publicly stated goal of engaging with North Korea’s hermetic regime and adopt the White House’s more confrontational approach to preventing the North from developing nuclear weapons.
He clashed with Mr. Cheney and some of the more conservative members of Mr. Bush’s foreign policy team, and was slow to discern his isolation from the rest of the national security team. “The years at State were quite difficult,” said William H. Taft IV, a longtime friend who served as the State Department’s legal adviser during Mr. Bush’s first term. “There were with people who had different world views.”
The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, put the country on a war footing and galvanized Mr. Bush’s war council. But eight months after the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had fallen, the United States was secretly planning another war: to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq once and for all.
Mr. Powell was a reluctant warrior in this impending fight, warning Mr. Bush that invading Iraq could destabilize the Middle East, upset oil markets and divert political will and resources from the unfinished fight against Al Qaeda. In a two-hour meeting with Mr. Bush on Aug. 5, 2002, Mr. Powell laid down what became known as the Pottery Barn rules: “You break it, you’re going to own it.”
As he did in the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Powell did not recommend whether the country should go to war or not — that he believed was the president’s prerogative alone — but he outlined options. After a failed diplomatic effort to avert a conflict, Mr. Bush turned to Mr. Powell to bolster the administration’s case for use of force if Saddam Hussein did not comply with international demands.
A ‘Painful’ Speech at the U.N.
In a 76-minute speech at the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, Mr. Powell pressed the American case for a possible war to disarm Iraq, presenting photographs, electronic intercepts of conversations between Iraqi military officers and information from defectors aimed at proving that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent danger to the world.
