There are moments in history when ideology stops being a parlor game for academics and actually shapes the future of the world. As American troops mass outside Baghdad, a battle of ideas is taking place inside Washington's corridors of power that could fashion a new Middle East. Leading the fight are the two titans of American foreign policy: the moderate and isolated Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and the hard-line Pentagon boss, Donald Rumsfeld. Though the two men make nice in public, they have fought over almost every aspect of U.S. foreign policy--from China to North Korea to Russia to, of course, Iraq. Rumsfeld and Powell last week broke several months of public comity, and it was no coincidence that the mortars started flying just when U.S. troops arrived at Baghdad's city limits.
For months it had seemed that the normally tidy Bush Administration, where debate is top secret and dissent is taboo, could never tolerate a rivalry of this size, depth or duration. But the grudge match between Powell and Rummy is one of the few dependable leitmotivs of the second Bush presidency--though the rivalry harks back to the first Bush. Powell, the moderate, was a favorite of Bush's father; Rumsfeld and Bush the elder never got along. Powell, a retired four-star general, trusts the military implicitly; Rumsfeld above all wants to teach it a few lessons. Each man enjoys rock-star status. Each came to his current post in a roundabout way. Rumsfeld, who once served as Richard Nixon's NATO ambassador, has become at 70 the civilian warrior. Powell, a lifetime soldier, is at 66 the country's top diplomat. In other words, each man considers himself an expert in his own field--and the other guy's as well.
But personalities are probably the least important factor in this face-off. At the core of the conflict are two different ways of looking at the world. Rumsfeld and his team of neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon favor an activist and often unilateralist approach to advancing America's interests abroad. Powell's camp sees the world through a prism of interlocking interests that need to be protected by alliances and stability. The fight between internationalists and unilateralists has gone on in the Republican Party for a generation. What's different this time is that Rummy and Powell are engaging in it at the very moment when the principles of U.S. foreign policy are up for grabs.
This is why both men are so eager to test-drive their theories in Iraq. Now that Saddam is on the verge of being ousted, the key battle is for control of the Iraqi interim authority, which will move the country from U.S. military rule to an elected Iraqi government, crafting its constitution and its future. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, insists the process will be open to all. "The Secretary is not promoting any individual or group to be the future government of Iraq," Wolfowitz told TIME. But behind the scenes, Rumsfeld's aides have been promoting a team of exiles led by Iraqi National Congress boss Ahmed Chalabi, 58, a former businessman, to control the interim authority. They view Chalabi as a reliable democrat in a nation of Saddam followers. But State, backed by CIA officials, says Chalabi is a charlatan who hasn't lived in Iraq since 1958 and has no constituency there. This group favors waiting to see which new forces emerge.