David Aaronovitch: General Powell is neither a hawk nor a dove - he's an owl

'With his military background, Powell can tell the hawks to back off and not be called a wuss'

Five days after the New York massacre I received one of those too-easily sent round robin e-mails that end up making the wrong assumptions about their recipients. This one had originated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and advised its members: "Should there be a strike this week, please go to your town centres at 6pm." I presume the idea was to protest against any retaliatory action taken by the US or its allies against targets in the Middle East. It seems unlikely that CND was proposing to stand around Leeds Town Hall at twilight shouting "Osama, Osama, Osama! Out, out, out!"

I'm sure that most of those on the mailing list were glad that they didn't have to turn out for such a melancholy vigil. But the absence of cruise missile strikes on sundry targets from Tripoli to Kandahar has created a problem for others, who may well – in a strange way – have been looking forward to opposing a war, and who had already had their placards printed. Certainly a few of them have been talking as though the bombing started weeks ago.

The ones that I find most egregious are those who oppose any action that the US might conceivably take, either on the basis of inconsistency or because the Americans have not furnished the world with "proof". The first category are the Whatabouts, as in "What about the US in Nicaragua?", "What about Israel?" or what about just about anything (and I've heard some pretty abstruse Whatabouts this week). Right-wing Whatabouts tend to throw in Noraid and the IRA for good measure. As to "proof", well Lestrade, call in Sherlock Holmes. This stuff gives doves a bad name.

Hawks already have one. From the moment that the second plane hit the second tower there were those who entered a competition to see who could suggest more places to bomb. Their lists sometimes overlapped, and sometimes had completely different names on them. After Afghanistan, Iraq was an obvious candidate following the Gulf War and given the exceptional nature of its regime. But after that you take your pick from Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan and North Korea. Interestingly, no one yet seems to have discovered terrorist training camps in Cuba.

And the hawks are dismayed that nothing yet has exploded, or getting worried that nothing much is going to. Writing in yesterday's Washington Post. the influential conservative George Will was concerned that coalition-building might sap the capacity to act. "Coalitions can become ends in themselves," he argued (not unreasonably), "particularly if the goal is a constantly and publicly expressed consensus from a 'broad-based' coalition." He felt the primary goal of the US government shouldn't be the potentially unbloody one of catching bin Laden et al, but the "superior" one of "causing the collapse of at least one nation's regime that provides sanctuary or other assistance to terrorists".

"At least one", pour discourager les autres I presume. Will's own favourite appeared to be Syria, though he also pointed out that "Iraq is rich in targets". To those who demurred, Will had this pithy rebuttal. "When advocates of merely minor objectives are praised as 'cooler heads', the pertinent attribute may be cold feet". Was his target really Colin Powell, George Bush's Secretary of State? The truth about the past 16 days has been that the Bush administration has astonished many of us with its carefulness and – yes – intelligence. I thought (and still think) he stole an election, and regarded his return to policy unilateralism on areas such as the environment as catastrophic. When the twin towers went down, I feared that the provocation would be too much, that a state of unthought (exactly the state that terrorists seek to create) would prevail.

It hasn't. Watching General Powell's interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last week was a revelation. The man was clever, cool, rational and anti-rhetorical. Instead of feeling bullied into line, I felt I was present at a discussion. I imagined this man at one of those conferences (familiar to those who have seen Thirteen Days or The West Wing), laying it out gently for his more excitable colleagues. Colleagues such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, who, according to the New Statesman's Andrew Stephen, once said he had been appointed to "neutralise Powell".

The Rev Jesse Jackson once told the black academic and writer Henry Louis Gates Jr, regarding Powell, that "very rich white people can trust him. They can trust him to drop bombs". But I wonder whether Jackson holds to that view. Also yesterday an official from Powell's State Department was asked about bombing. "We could do a lot more harm than good," he replied. "Remember, we didn't get anything out of the carpet-bombing the B-52s did in Vietnam, and we had a lot better target information there than we're ever likely to have in Afghanistan."

With his military background, Powell can tell the hawks to back off and not be called a wuss. He is already supposed to have told Wolfowitz that any direct assault on Saddam's government would do immense damage to the coalition he is building. So far, congressional Democrats have backed this line, and – in public at any rate – so have Republicans. One told the New York Times that there was "no blood lust in the country at the moment". Remarkably a Defence Department official on his way to Brussels told journalists that the armed forces were in the back seat for this campaign. "It isn't exclusively military," he said, adding, "It isn't even primarily military."

The case for intelligence is overwhelming. Nothing illustrated this as well as events in Iran this week. First Jack Straw was given encouragement by the moderates in Tehran, and then Ayatollah Ali Khamenei knocked us back to the accompaniment of chants of "Death to America". The reason is the obvious one that Iran is undergoing a transition in which different forces contend. We have it in our power, if we act unwisely, to strengthen the very forces we are most frightened of.

Powell can be too careful. To Gates (albeit several years ago) he quoted Bismarck's odious dictum about the Balkans not being worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier to justify non-intervention in Bosnia. That was a strategy (endorsed by Britain and the EU) that ended in Srebrenica. One wonders if he has absorbed the principal lessons of the past 12 years, which are that the world is interdependent in a way thought unimaginable, and that the consequences of inaction are often worse than the results of intervention.

And one hopes that just as he is careful in war, Powell can be audacious in peace. Forget morality for a moment – a million refugees in Pakistan have a way of becoming our problem. There is a job of reconstruction to do in the region, which will take people and treasure on a large scale. There can be no US disengagement from the Middle East peace process, no matter how difficult it is or how many setbacks there are.

I think he can see this. As Powell sat with Paxman, with his round face looking through large glasses, it occurred to me that there is a better bird than the hawk or the dove. There's the owl.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com