'What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?' Madeleine Albright screamed at Colin Powell. Her stinging rebuke could not have been better designed to scrape a raw American nerve, challenging the nation's machismo and role as leader of the free word. Powell reacted furiously. 'I thought I would have an aneurysm,' he recalled. 'American GIs are not toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game board'
That was 1992. Powell's resistance to US moves to stop the carnage in Bosnia delayed intervention for three and a half bloody years. Powell, then chairman of the military joint chiefs of staff, could not intervene: it was against his credo of ultra-caution - the 'Powell Doctrine'.
Now the world awaits the start of Powell's war, a war that will know no limits, and the Powell Doctrine will play no part. The war which will define the Bush administration will be led by someone the Bush faction most despises.
The President had to fight to secure his first and star appointment. Yet the most popular man in America was isolated in the new White House; a centrist in an administration of conservatives. A month ago, Time ran a story on Powell's great disappearing act: 'Powell's megastar wattage seems curiously dimmed.'
Time's timing was unfortunate. The current crisis has seen Powell, in his deceptively quiet way, gain ascendancy over his many rivals. War in Afghanistan may now come sooner rather than later, but Powell has so far beaten off a faction led by Bush's Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, which favoured fast and wide-ranging military strikes against Afghanistan, Iraq and even parts of Lebanon - with the US going it alone if necessary. They are not new foes; Powell has been fighting with these men and with Bush's Vice President, Dick Cheney, over three decades.
Powell's secret is to pick his battles, acting on his belief that power often lies in restraint. He is a coalition-builder first and foremost. 'You can't be unilateralist,' Powell once said, 'the world is too complicated.' He has countered Rumsfeld by arguing that America needs to corral a worldwide alliance in a war on terrorism, in which military action would be just one of many front lines. It would also involve international banking, policing, international justice, public security, espionage and surveillance.
But Powell's discomfort comes because he can no longer play by his own rules. The Powell Doctrine - first and foremost, restraint - emerged from his time as America's highest military official under Presidents Bush Senior and Clinton. Roughly put, it is: do not get involved in military intervention unless it is in the nation's vital interests; only intervene militarily if the political goals are clear and achievable; only use overwhelming force, properly built up.
This was what made Powell invade Kuwait but urge a withholding of US military power in Bosnia. Powell insisted on a disastrous military intervention in Somalia: the humiliating retreat underpinned his mistrust of armchair generals clamouring for action. 'As soon as they tell me military intervention is limited, it means they do not care whether you achieve a result or not,' he said. 'As soon as they tell me it's surgical, I head for the bunker.' He added: 'We do deserts, we don't do mountains.'
Afghanistan is nothing but mountains. The most often mooted option of selective air strikes followed by special forces mounting ground raids could be the dictionary definition of 'surgical'. Powell only goes to war with an exit strategy; this time, it is hard to find an entrance strategy.
Americans trust their Secretary of State to find the new foreign policy and language (avoiding the ill-advised 'crusades') demanded by the atrocity. For Powell is a complex American icon: the dove-ish military man; black but of the establishment; loved and feared.
The African-American civil rights movement cannot bear that he is a Republican. 'Whites always want to create the black of their choice as their leader,' says Henry Louis Gates, the African-American spokesman-scholar at Harvard. 'So for the white people this nice, clean-cut military guy becomes something really worth selling and promoting.' Powell has staked a claim way beyond his brief as America's face on the world stage. When Bush made him Secretary of State, he spoke about his own origins and about race, about education, the military, and about the American social and political fabric.
Successive polls have found Powell to be the most popular man in America. His autobiography, My American Journey, topped the New York Times bestseller list. On his first day at work in the State Department, staffers applauded him. Seasoned officials say he is the easiest, most courteous, least arrogant Secretary they have worked with. He is immediately appealing - firm and polite, with a charming smile and a flicker in this eyes which only thinly veils the reinforced steel beneath. 'I'm still a New Deal kid from Harlem and the South Bronx,' Powell - now worth $28 million - once said.
Powell was born in Harlem in 1937, the son of Jamaicans who had immigrated in search of work. The family moved to the Bronx, where Colin was raised in a secure, religious family. He worked in a toyshop and was an undistinguished pupil and student, but shone at the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Posted in Fort Benning, Georgia, he was often refused service in diners and bars.
Powell served twice in Vietnam, winning two Purple Hearts. 'I had gone off to Vietnam in 1962, standing on a bedrock of principle and convictions. And I had watched the foundation eroded by euphemisms, lies and self-deception.' But troops from his division slaughtered more than 300 civilians at My Lai in 1968. Powell was asked to investigate and did not mention My Lai in his report. The words 'cover up' have circulated.
Back from war, Powell began to entwine military life with politics. He voted for John Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Jimmy Carter in 1976, but appears to have shifted loyalties in 1980, to Ronald Reagan. He served under Frank Carlucci in the Republican Ford administration, under President Carter in the Pentagon. Under Reagan Powell became special military assistant to Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, cutting his teeth on the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya. In 1987 became National Security Advisor. During these years, the administration dived deep into the bloody 'Dirty Wars' in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. In My American Journey Powell states that he was the 'chief administration advocate' for the murderous Contras, the right-wing Nicaraguan paramilitaries illegally backed from Washington. He was familiar with the sanctions-busting arms sales to Iran that financed that support, and Powell's testimony to an enquiry into what became the 'Iran-Contra' case was found to be 'at least misleading'.
In 1989 President Bush Senior made him chairman of the joint chiefs - the youngest man, and the first black man, to ever hold the post which, thanks to a law of 1986 redefining its role, enjoyed greater influence than at any time since World War II.
It was Saddam Hussein's lust for power, oil and blood that dictated the next, most important phase in Powell's life. He initially opposed the use of force, preferring economic sanctions - to the outrage of then Defence Secretary Cheney who had to order him to draw up military plans. But operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm gave the US a morally unimpeachable victory in a video-game war, and made Colin Powell a household name.
Washington's cognoscenti saw in Powell the ideal candidate for senior office, if not the White House. But Powell stayed on at the Pentagon, insisting upon disastrous military intervention in Somalia and an even more disastrous refusal to intervene in Bosnia. It was the latter which provoked Madeleine Albright's stinging rebuke.
When Powell left the Pentagon in 1993, the pressure to stand for office became acute, but his best friend, Richard Armitage, now his deputy, advised: 'It's not worth it. Don't do it. The process is every bad thing you can imagine.' Then came the call from Bush and now, with the soldier turned diplomat, Powell's cause is America itself, a nation trying to claw a way back from its darkest days, and into a war that has no rules, save those of the people who will wage it. Notably himself.
COLIN LUTHER POWELL
Born: 5 April 1937, The Bronx
Job: US Secretary of State
Career: Army from 1958; rising to chairman of the joint chiefs of staff
Politics: Served Clinton and three Republic Presidents; could have joined either party
Family: Married to Edie; two sons, one daughter