Powell flies out with a post-war warning for Syria and Iran

On the eve of a fence-mending trip to Europe and Turkey, Colin Powell has ratcheted up pressure on Syria and Iran, hinting that if they did not change their ways, they too would come under intense pressure from Washington, after the war with Iraq was won.

Mr Powell leaves today for Ankara, then EU and Nato headquarters in Brussels, in a personal bid to ease strains between the United States and some of its alliance partners over the Iraq campaign.

He will be trying to to defuse tensions with Turkey after the latter refused permission for the US to launch a second front against Baghdad from its territory.

The visits will be seen as answering critics who blame the diplomatic debacle before the war, in part at least, on General Powell's alleged aversion to taking US diplomacy on the road.

And it is widely suggested that one reason the Secretary of State, the lone prominent moderate in the Adminis-tration, prefers to stay at home to avoid being outflanked by the hardline camp led by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, while he is travelling outside the country.

Those tensions resurfaced yesterday with reports in The Washington Post that former senior Republican government officials – code for close associates of President George Bush's father during the first Gulf War in 1991 – are trying to turn the younger Bush against the uncompromising policies advocated by Mr Cheney, Mr Rumsfeld and the deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz. They are said to believe this is "bum advice" which is seriously damaging long-term US interests.

These former officials, inevitably, are linked with General Powell. He was the elder Bush's chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in 1991, so the Secretary of State also retains informal ties with many uniformed commanders at today's Pentagon, who are believed to be uneasy with the war strategy of Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Wolfowitz.

The Defence Secretary, with his insistence that a smaller force, backed by air power and wider use of special forces, would be enough to topple Saddam Hussein, has implicitly challenged the so-called "Powell Doctrine," calling for the assembly of overwhelming force to defeat an enemy. Yesterday White House officials flatly dismissed the talk of disagreement. And as one anonymous former official told the Post: "The only person who can reach the President is his father, but it is not timely yet to talk to him."

General Powell's sharp words for Syria and Iran, which follow similar warnings from Mr Rumsfeld at the weekend, also seem intended to show that the Administration is fully united on policy.

Damascus faced a "critical choice," General Powell told the annual policy conference here of the American Israel public affairs committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby group.

Either Syria, which has vociferously opposed the war, "can continue direct support for terrorist groups and the dying regime of Saddam Hussein", or it could chose a "more hopeful course". Either way, it would have to face the consequences.

He also demanded that Iran stop supporting terrorist groups opposed to Israel and the Middle East peace process, and abandon its pursuit of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, and of the missile systems to deliver them.

That did not mean that "we are going on a war footing" against Tehran, after Iraq had been dealt with, General Powell said in an interview with The New York Times.

But in the next breath, he put Syria and Libya "in the same category" as Iran, echoing of the hawkish Under Secretary of State John Bolton, who a few months ago implied the two latter countries were junior members of President Bush's "axis of evil". And, General Powell added: "We haven't taken any of our options off the table."