| BY Paul Reynolds
World affairs correspondent, BBC News website |
Colin Powell never quite found his place in a Bush administration dominated by neo-conservatives.
Nor did he make the transition from general to statesman.
His weakness was that he lacked the vision of the world held by his rivals. Colin Powell was no dove. He too believed in US power and influence but where others saw certainty, he saw complexity. This slowed him down and gave them the edge.
He seemed to find it more natural to follow an order than to give one.
And in the end, he lacked the ear of the president, without which a secretary of state is powerless.
The result was disengagement.
Marginalised
The confident figure who led the United States military in the war against Iraq in 1991 became something of a marginalised figure in the war against Iraq in 2003.
The one internal battle he won over Iraq - that the US should go to the UN - was soon overtaken by events as the United States went to war anyway.
He was all but humiliated when the aggressive briefing he gave in February 2003 to the Security Council about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction turned out to be based on wrong intelligence.
It has also emerged that he was told of President George W Bush's decision to go to war after the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
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