Powell reminded reporters accompanying him on the plane that while on his maiden trip to the Syrian capital two years before, he had won President Assad’s agreement to stop a lucrative oil deal with Iraq that presumably violated UN sanctions. The Syrians, said Powell, never kept their word. While in Damascus this time, he added, “I’m sure there will be occasion to remind my Syrian colleagues that two years ago I got an assurance about oil going into the pipeline that turned out not to be the case.” Then: “I will always have that in my background software and on my hard drive.”

That information was stored in the secretary’s anthropomorphic computer just about the time that close-knit cabal of about 20 neocons took charge in government, hawkish ideologues with imperial designs who, by making “regime change” the central feature of American foreign policy, favor the “imposition of democracy” over the “transition to democracy” in the world, and who proceed from the mistaken belief that American moral values, political ideas and social practices are imbued with latent universality. Theirs is the notion that, by showing them a bit of American steel, all those wretched countries inhabited by brown-skinned peoples, especially in the Middle East, would ultimately embrace the American system and finally get to look like California.

Without American intervention, including its military variety, these countries, in other words, would remain dangerously unstable political and economic hybrids, with an arrested political culture. Recently, the top neocon honcho, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, claimed that “there has got to be change in Syria,” which resulted in the administration’s subsequent pressure on Damascus, leading commentators — and not just those in the Arab world — to worry if Syria was next on the list of these neocons, who draw for their inspiration on a new missionary zeal in American political thought that they themselves have fostered over the last two years.

Lest you think these folks are a mere bunch of Don Quixotes with little influence in President Bush’s administration, consider how former British Cabinet minister, Lord Jopling, identified them in a speech at the House of Lords on March 18: “Neoconservatives now have a stranglehold on the Pentagon and seem, as well, to have an armlock on the president himself.”

So has this clique of crusading foreign-policy intellectuals, who want to change the world and make it, among other things, safe for Israel (a dominant concern in their agenda), hijacked the foreign policy of the only superpower in the world today?

Iraq was these ideologues’ test case, and American military victory there appears to have increased their power. And Colin Powell, who early on in his career in government was intent on establishing standards of maturity and order in diplomacy, but who now has thrown to the wind whatever reservations he had had about the use of force as a vehicle of conflict resolution (recall his speech at the UN on Feb. 5), appears to have gone along to get along.

Asked what he hoped to tell Syrian leaders, Powell responded with the devotion of a convert to neoconservatism. Or, if you wish, with the arrogance of a viceroy from bygone colonial days. “I will make very clear how the United States views the changed strategic situation in the region,” he said. “What I’ll be looking for ... is specific action and performance on the part of the Syrian government that will reflect an understanding of this new situation.”

Otherwise, he threatened on Sunday upon his return to Washington, during an interview on Meet the Press, “there will be consequences.” The Syrian president, an ophthalmologist, saw the writing on the wall.