Thomas Friedman, the New York Times's veteran foreign affairs analyst, was writing in January about Colin Powell before his confirmation hearing as Secretary of State in the new Bush administration.
Reflecting on his subject's 35 years in the US army and his last two in civvies as a director of America Online, Friedman asked a question that seems uncannily prescient.
"For the America Onduty people, the world is divided between friends and enemies. For the America Online people, it is divided between members and non-members of the network. The America Onduty people focus on who's on America's terrorism list. The America Online people focus on who's on America's buddy list.
"Yes, these are caricatures, but there's something to them. They reflect two different ways of looking at the world. So which lens is Mr Powell wearing - the one he developed with America Onduty or with America Online?"
On the answer, perhaps, hangs the shape of the troubled period of world history which we are entering.
Powell, a man of great charm and intellect who electrifies a room by his presence but wears his success lightly, is an enormously authoritative and reassuring figure to millions of Americans at this time, and, one suspects, to world leaders. In his office in the Pentagon in the old days he had a framed quotation from Thucydides, a historian of ancient Greece, that seemed to sum up a man who in Roosevelt's words speaks softly but carried a big stick: "Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most."
The soldier turned diplomat now, however, faces twin challenges of monumental delicacy and importance: to build and shape a global alliance against terror, and to persuade his President, against his unilateralist, go-it-alone instincts and the advice of hawks in Cabinet, to tailor his campaign of retaliation to the constraints inherent in such an alliance.
News reports suggest he is already engaged in a battle with the hawkish Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who wants to extend the US retaliation to Iraq and the unfinished business of toppling Saddam Hussein, a campaign which Powell believes would split asunder the delicate alliance he is building. If Powell fails now, many feel America may enjoy the sweetness of revenge but will sow the seeds of a dangerous harvest for the future.
Yet barely two weeks ago his critics were writing him off. Time magazine, among others, was sticking in the knife. "It comes as one of the biggest surprises in the emerging Bush II era that Colin Powell, the man many thought would walk into the presidency himself a few years ago, is leaving such shallow footprints," Time said.
"Powell's megastar wattage looks curiously dimmed."
Colin Powell was born in Harlem in 1937 to parents who had immigrated from Jamaica 17 years earlier. They moved to the multi-ethnic South Bronx as his father worked his way up through various menial jobs to become foreman of the shipping office of a department store. His mother was a garment worker and union supporter.
Powell worked for a toy store. Later he attended the City College of New York, joined the officer training corps and began a rapid climb through the army. He spent two tours in Vietnam. It was a crucial time for a man who would spend almost all of the rest of his career at the very political interface between the military and its civilian leaders.
On his second tour, the death in his arms of a young soldier who had stepped on a mine left an indelible impression "I had gone off to Vietnam in 1962 standing on a bedrock of principle and convictions," Powell wrote in his autobiography, "and I had watched the foundation eroded by euphemisms, lies and self-deception . . .
"War should be the politics of last resort," he wrote. "Many of my generation vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand."
His was to be the classic expression of the military's post-Vietnam syndrome. Distrust-ful of politicians dabbling in wars where soldiers were little more than political cannon fodder, Powell went back to first principles and developed what has become known as the "Powell doctrine".
He sums it up this way: "Is the national interest at stake? If the answer is yes, go in to win. Otherwise stay out." It is a view which has earned him a reputation as one of the most political of chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and much flak from the more gung-ho physical-force politicians and pundits. The right complains bitterly that during the Gulf War, Powell questioned whether liberating Kuwait from Iraq was worth American lives. It is said that Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defence, literally had to order him to provide military options to President George Bush snr.
At the end of the war, he was successful in opposing the idea of finishing off the Republican Guard and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
For the left, his strong objections to US military involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo rankled. He argued that anything short of a massive deployment of ground forces was unlike-ly to be effective and that in any case, war in the Balkans didn't affect America's national interests. His public opposition, extraordinary for a serving officer, is said to have delayed action by President Clinton in Bosnia, who feared his enormous popularity.
Madeleine Albright, then ambassador to the UN, asked: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" He is said to have supported the disastrous mission to Somalia where 18 marines would die.
Rather than opposing the Washington establishment, Powell, by his own admission a "reluctant warrior", had joined it. His first stint in the White House was in the Nixon era when he was on secondment from the army. He then earned an MBA, cut his teeth on national security policy in the Carter Pentagon and returned to work for Casper Weinberger, the National Security Adviser.
He served as National Security Adviser and became the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then the first black Secretary of State, carrying with him huge expectations into an administration defined by its lack of them.
His presence in the Bush cabinet gave legitimacy to a president who received 5 per cent of the black vote and had zero foreign policy experience, a heavy hitter the public trusted with charisma and the people-management skills a demoralised State Department needed. They greeted him with rapturous applause.
"He ascended to his position with almost a godlike reputation," says Senator Chuck Hagel, a senior Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee. Since the Gulf war, public opinion polls have repeatedly shown him to be the most admired American of the era. He even contemplated running for president but was dissuaded, it is said, by his wife Alma.
His message on appointment to the Bush administration was upbeat and internationalist. America could lead, he said, "not by using our strength and position of power to get back behind our walls, but by being engaged in the world". Politically, that is.
Less openly combative than others, the first months of the administration were not comfortable times for Powell. Time and again he appeared wrong-footed and while President Bush is known to admire him, when he looks for briefing it is to Rice with whom he has a close personal relationship.
Powell has faced a series of significant and surprisingly public defeats which have led some to believe he has lost the battle for influence. It's not that Powell is out of sympathy with the politics of the Bush administration, at least the "compassionate conservatism" it is supposed to be about, but he is instinctively conservative.
At times there appears to be a desperate wishful thinking about his comments. "Sometimes I get frustrated making the case that the US is not unilateralist," he has complained. "You can't be unilateralist. The world is too complicated for anyone to be unilateralist."
He was blindsided by the repudiation of the Kyoto protocol. "That's one where I would have done it differently," he admitted to journalists. He has been uncomfortable as Bush kicked the legs from under eight international treaties for which Powell had little enthusiasm but believed he could renegotiate to the US's advantage.
Within hours of Powell telling South Korea that the US was willing to continue its dialogue with the North, Mr Bush announced, to Seoul's horror, that he could not trust Pyongyang and that the dialogue was off. After the EU took up the challenge, Washington gradually sidled its way back on side. "I got a little far forward on my skis," Powell was to admit ruefully.
There is little doubt that Powell wanted to attend the UN conference on racism in Durban, working for months to clear the obstacles. His presence would have gone a long way both to enhance the standing of the US and answer the arguments of its critics.
On missile defence, Powell was a sceptic, but now is a firm proponent of what until now has been Bush's favourite foreign policy.
He has had some successes - the handling of the Chinese downing of the US spy plane after the first 24 hours of Cold War rhetoric, had all the hallmarks of Powell crisis-management. To the European allies' relief, he persuaded Bush to back off his election promise to withdraw US troops from the Balkans. His once-demoralised department has seen a turnaround in morale.
Powell's friends dismiss talk of a loss of influence though admit to some disappointment on his part but, they say, he is a man with a long view. "I'm not frustrated. There are problems to be solved and my job is to help the President find the right answer to the problems he faces. It's not for me to be frustrated; that's not an option," he told Time loyally before the current crisis broke.
"It's not whether I prevailed or failed to prevail on a particular issue. I'm not looking for anything except to serve this President and the American people as best I can."
His time has come. At the almost daily briefings he has given, he is calm, eloquent, even joking. So far it has been the Powell line which has prevailed. Patience, consultation with allies, multilateralism are the orders of the day. How the Powell doctrine accommodates itself to the new kind of war will be the real test.
