Powell Wants Out

Powell Would Not Want to Serve 4 More Years, Aide Says

By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell is weary and would not want to serve another full four years under President Bush, a close aide was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

"He's tired. Mentally and physically," Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, who has known the retired general for 15 years, is quoted as telling GQ Magazine.

"If the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don't think he'd want to do another four years," Wilkerson added in a lengthy story flagged on GQ's Web site under the headline "Colin Powell wants out."

GQ's article depicts Powell as exhausted, frustrated and bitter, uncomfortable with Bush's agenda and weary from battles with the Pentagon that are typical in U.S. administrations.

What is unusual about the GQ piece is that its author had wide access to senior officials, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as well as some of Powell's closest aides, like Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Boucher said the aides and friends would not have spoken to GQ if Powell had not wanted them to but the secretary of state did not know what his associates would tell the magazine.

GQ quoted Wilkerson calling the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba the "dumbest policy on the face of the Earth ... It's crazy."

The aide also took aim at Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, a U.S. hard-liner who once served on a Pentagon advisory panel and is regarded as an intellectual architect of the U.S. war in Iraq.

"I call them utopians," Wilkerson said. "I don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it."

"I have some reservations about people who have never been in the face of battle, so to speak, who are making cavalier decisions about sending men and women out to die," he added. "A person who comes immediately to mind ... is Richard Perle."