For those in Washington less committed to invading—but open to it—Powell was less a man than a north star. As long as he remained in the Bush administration, it meant that there were voices of sanity around Bush, and so it became possible to see Bush as something other than delusionally bellicose—or, at least, as a delusionally bellicose man restrained by the sobriety and responsibility of the hero at Foggy Bottom. This was a point that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush were happy to see take hold, since it so perfectly served their invasion—so long as Powell kept playing his role.

Perhaps the most illustrative example comes from then-Senator Joe Biden. In summer 2002, Biden, long a critic of the neocons, saw the looming Iraq invasion through the prism of factional conflict within the administration. He sought to strengthen Powell. But Powell made the fateful decision to present U.N. weapons inspections of Saddam Hussein as an alternative to invading Iraq, rather than the precursor to it. Powell contended to Bush that seeking U.N. inspections cost them nothing; would minimize the objections of foreign capitals in the event of war; and could even provide a pretext for invasion should Saddam prove recalcitrant. That meant Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the Democrats’ leading foreign-policy voices, lined up behind Powell’s weapons inspections.

Bush perfectly exploited the opportunity Powell gave him. That fall, when he sought a vote from Congress on the invasion, a central argument was that a vote for war could be a vote for not-war, by strengthening Powell’s hand at the U.N. for inspections-based disarmament.