Colin Powell and the Evil of Banality
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101506H.shtml
Gary Kamiya puts Powell under the microscope through his autobiography and recent books by Bob Woodward and Karen DeYoung. The gist being that Powell was the only person in the country able to stop the war from happening and he wimped out… he was a “good soldier” blah blah … 650,000 deaths later.
Woodward, in his new book… in an interview with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Woodward tells Levin, “I thought Powell was in anguish about what had happened in Iraq, with 130,000 troops still stuck there, facing an ever-growing insurgency.
“‘I don’t want to hear about his anguish,’ Levin said, nearly exploding in anger. ‘I don’t have the stomach to hear his anguish. He is so smart and his instincts are so decent and good that I just can’t accept his anguish. I expected more than anguish.’
“‘What did you want?’ I asked. ‘An apology?’
“‘Honesty. I wanted honesty. I don’t want to read a year later or two years later that this is the worst moment of his life or something … Powell had the potential to change the course here. He’s the only one who had potential to.’
“‘How could he have done that?’ I asked.
“‘If he had told the president that this is the wrong course,’ Levin said. ‘I don’t think he ever realized what power lay in his hands, and that’s an abdication. I think Powell has tremendous power’ …
“‘When Bush asked Powell in January 2003 if he would be with him in the war, Levin said, Powell was at the peak of his influence.
“‘Can you imagine what would have happened if he’d said, “I’ve got to give that a little thought”? Can you imagine the power of that one person to change the course? He had it.'”
And the beat goes on.
-MAB
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I could not agree more with Gary Kamiya. Two or three years ago someone commented on MBC that Powell seemed like a decent chap and I replied at the time with much indignation. At the crucial moment when he should have stood up to be counted Powell let himself down, his principles down and his country down. He lent himself to the whole disgraceful ‘Iraq’s WMD’ charade at the UN to justify an unjustifiable attack on a country, which posed no direct threat whatsoever to the US and not only that to allow his own comrades in arms, about whom he professes to care so much, to be sent on a mission, which he knew to be doomed. How dared he then to start wringing his hands safely after the event? Does he think we are all amnesiacs? The ‘loyalty to the C in C’ argument holds no more water today than it did at Nurenburg in 1945/6 – it didn’t get the German military very far then. I think that a big problem one has with Powell is that one’s expectations of him were higher. We all know/knew that Rummy is unbalanced, Cheney is a thug and Bush is like a monkey with a machine gun so nothing they can do should either surprise or even particlarly disappoint us. One thought one had the right, however, to expect more of Powell and boy did he let us down.
Posted on 17-Oct-06 at 12:10 pm | Permalink