Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Ties in the Cabinet

As the new Bob Woodward book makes evident, Secretary of State Colin Powell was kept out of the loop in talks about Iraq war planning. That coupled with Powell's opposition to going to war before exhausting diplomacy resulted in a major rift between himself and Vice President Cheney.

For those questioning the accuracy of Woodward's book, he spent hours in interviews with several people in the administration and interviewed President Bush himself. It looks like the White House is going to spend another week of news cycles trying to downplay new revelations in a book. I sense that their tactics of crying foul have become pretty ineffective.

The risk to the White House with this book is that Powell is one of the most respected members in the Administration. The revelations that his influence has been regularly undercut by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush, are likely to lead more people to question this Administration's motives and tactics regarding the war in Iraq.