Powell has become Bush's McNamera

Guardian - He won the battles, but lost the wars

US secretary of state Colin Powell gave a forlorn and illuminating interview to the Washington Post, published only in one brief excerpt. In it he explained that there was no matter of principle over which he would resign and depicted tenure as a long mission of retreat and loss.

Powell chooses to identify with two of his predecessors: Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state; and George C Marshall, like Powell an army general. He observed that the "single trait that always comes to me when I think about these two guys is selfless service". When Marshall was passed over as commander of the D-Day invasion for Dwight Eisenhower, Powell said that "whatever disappointment he felt over that, he simply ate it". When Marshall argued against President Truman's recognition of the state of Israel, he took his loss in silence, and Powell quoted him: "No, gentlemen, you don't take a post of this sort, and then resign when the man who has the constitutional responsibility to make decisions makes one you don't like."

Powell said he raised these incidents because he wanted to illustrate his "personal code". Without prompting, he spoke about Jefferson: "... he said something along the lines, 'I go now to the task that you have put before me, in the certain knowledge that I will come out of it diminished'."

Powell's loyalty to those who have shepherded his career, from the Nixon administration to the present, has taken precedent over all else. He has won battles but lost the wars. His efforts, along with Blair's, to pursue the UN route on Iraq is now revealed by the former director of state department policy planning, Richard Haass, to have been largely a matter of PR. Haass says national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told him in June 2003: "Save your breath - the president has already decided what he's going to do on this."