Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama for president is of little importance. There was a time, just after the First Gulf War, when Powell’s name and reputation stood for something good and true in American history. He was a man who represented realism and moderation in all things, but that is no longer the case. Colin Powell, more than anyone else, sold us all the Iraq War. He was fully part of the egregious Bush circus in the White House. There were many, many people in the “plague year” of 2002 who accepted the necessity of war on the basis of a complex set of lies persistently sold by public figures. Powell was the most important of those figures.
Powell is someone who truly "blotted his copybook," as the Brits used to say. After a lifetime of service and achievement, he chose in the end to "drink the Kool-Aid" that flowed in the bloodstream of the Bush/Cheney/neocon regime that has ruled the United States for the last eight years. He was secretary of state at a time when his firm opposition, and ultimately his resignation, would have crippled the onrushing utopian crusade for Westernization in Iraq.
He should hide himself and hope that someday men will remember the good of him and not the worst.
He did not choose to follow that path. Instead, he chose to believe the corrupted judgments of an intelligence community leadership that betrayed the country and the armed forces by producing nonsensical estimates designed to create support for war among an ignorant and bellicose public that hungered for revenge against an enemy they could not even define. He chose to believe George Tenet’s version of the truth in spite of the fact that the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research was on record in the Iraq NIE of October 2002 as opposing the lies.
When he was asked by Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press about his role as the greatest of all the enablers of the Iraq War decision, he took shelter behind the collection of garbage that was served up in 2002-2003 by Tenet and company as justification for war.
For Shame! For Shame!
He should hide himself and hope that someday men will remember the good of him and not the worst.
I suppose that President Obama will find something for Colin Powell to do for the next few years, but that will be unfortunate.
W. Patrick Lang is a retired career officer of the US Army who served in the Infantry, in Special Forces and in Military Intelligence.
