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Will The Real Colin Powell Stand Up?
The White House Fears That The Former Secretary of State Will Finally Tell The Truth About Planning For The Iraq War.
Every movement, gesture and tic of the Bush administration is shadowed by its past. When National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell was deployed politically to overawe timorous legislators into approving unlimited and warrantless domestic surveillance, he was acting in the shadow of former CIA Director George Tenet, whose presence was used to lend credibility to intelligence being fixed to suit arguments for the invasion of Iraq. As Gen. David Petraeus prepares to deliver his report in September on the "surge" in Iraq, he is elevated into the ultimate reliable source, just as former Secretary of State Colin Powell's sterling reputation was exploited for his delivery of the case for invasion before the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, a date that will live in mendacity, for every statement he made was later revealed to be false; Powell regretted publicly that it was an everlasting "blot" on his good name. Meanwhile, during the dog days of August, the president's aides are preparing the fall public relations campaign to envelop Petraeus' report. On cue, neoconservative organs spew out good news of "progress on the ground" and thrash critics as "defeatist." "Defeatists in Retreat" trumpets William Kristol's latest screed in the Weekly Standard, repackaging old themes once again.
Behind the display of bravado, the West Wing is seized with anxiety. Any rustle in the brush, any sudden noise, upsets the president's aides. As they try to regain their composure and confidence, recalling the glory days when they constituted themselves as the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, a P.R. juggernaut before the invasion, they know who and what they have buried along the way and fear their return.
The release of a documentary on the administration's failures in Iraq, "No End in Sight," directed by Charles Ferguson, has the White House spooked. Bush's aides are not worried because the film is brilliantly shot and edited, or because it is compelling, but because of what -- or whose appearance -- it might augur to upset their September rollout.
The film features three former administration officials speaking on camera as unreserved critics of prewar and postwar planning: Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson; Powell's former deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage; and former U.S. ambassador Barbara Bodine, a senior member of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq, closely aligned with Powell.
Wilkerson and Bodine have spoken out before. But Armitage's debut in particular has the White House fuming and fretting that it somehow signals Powell's emergence as a full-throated critic in the middle of the September P.R. offensive. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, according to sources close to him, has voiced anger and concern about whether Powell will step forward and what he might say, and other presidential aides are wondering how to cope with that nightmarish possibility.
Two months ago, Powell declared the surge a near-certain failure. On June 10, on NBC's "Meet the Press," he declared, "The current strategy to deal with it, called a surge -- the military surge, our part of the surge under General Petraeus -- the only thing it can do is put a heavier lid on this boiling pot of civil war stew ... And so General Petraeus is moving ahead with his part of it, but he's the one who's been saying all along there is no military solution to this problem. The solution has to emerge from the other two legs, the Iraqi political actions and reconciliation, and building up the Iraqi security and police forces. And those two legs are not -- are not going well. That part of strategy is not going well."
Hadley and others are taking Powell's early skepticism toward the surge and willingness to express it as a potential sign that he will swoop down on them just after Petraeus asks for more forbearance for the president's policy. Powell is the White House's ticking-time-bomb scenario. He was Petraeus before Petraeus, the good soldier before the good soldier, window-dressing before window-dressing. The White House aides' fear of Powell reflects their guilt, if not their stricken consciences, over his disposal. Powell was used, ruined and tossed overboard. His warnings were ignored, his loyalty was abused, and when he no longer served Bush's purposes he was unceremoniously discarded.
Throughout the excruciating years of his slow destruction, no one served Powell less ably than Powell. To the degree that his abusers and tormentors may be haunted, he is more haunted. Powell's aides are now on the front line of criticism against the administration, while he obviously simmers, pretending to be happily retired. He travels the country delivering motivational speeches, a theater of make-believe, as though he were the same Colin Powell as before Bush. While he preaches his secrets of success, he can see the neoconservative architects of failure in Iraq who demonized him distributed among the leading Republican candidates for president. There is not one among them who does not boast neocon dominance of his foreign policy circle. Powell's absence cedes the political terrain to those who ousted him from office. Notwithstanding his tarnished reputation, he has a final chance to regain his dignity and at least some of his previous standing by stepping forward at the crucial hour. Does he accept his marginalization as permanent? He is Banquo's ghost, but will he make an appearance at Bush's banquet?
Hadley and Co. worry that Powell may be secretly writing a memoir that would expose their hidden history, though Powell has said he will not produce a sequel to his inspirational autobiography. One of the most significant stories for which Powell would be an ideal narrator is his own mistreatment and misjudgments. Were Powell to decide to stop serving his false friends and instead to serve history, or if he were to decide simply to serve the truth before Bush perpetrates more damage, he would have to start at the beginning.
When did he realize that as secretary of state he was not the principal foreign policy advisor to the president? Was it when he was appointed in December 2000 as secretary-designate?
Being an experienced bureaucrat at the most senior levels of government, having been national security advisor and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, why did he not make common cause with Brent Scowcroft and other experienced senior personnel with whom he had long relationships to get an alternative point of view to a president whose only policy choices were being filtered through Dick Cheney's neocon structure? As chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Scowcroft was politically isolated, forced to speak out occasionally in Op-Ed pieces and interviews. When Scowcroft published his Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal on Aug. 15, 2002, "Don't Attack Saddam," where was Powell and what did he say to Scowcroft?
Why did Powell not join Scowcroft in expressing concern about the rehabilitation of Iran-Contra convicted felon Elliott Abrams, appointed on June 1, 2001, as special assistant to the president and senior director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. And why did Powell make no effort to block Cheney's neocon takeover of the administration?
On Oct. 5, 2004, two weeks before he was ousted by Bush as chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Scowcroft objected to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's advisor Dov Weisglass' statement in favor of freezing the Oslo peace process. Why didn't Powell step in to help Scowcroft against Abrams' manipulation of information flowing to the president about what Weisglass was saying? Was Powell aware that Abrams was working with Weisglass?
Powell watched as the neocons filled strategic positions throughout the administration. Why did he agree to the appointment of John Bolton as undersecretary for arms control and international security on May 11, 2001, and keep him on instead of firing him for reporting to Cheney rather than to him? Why did he permit Bolton to hire neocon David Wurmser as a special advisor?
On Sept. 17, 2001, one week after 9/11, Bush signed a "top secret" document to begin planning the invasion of Iraq. Powell was later reported to have said at meetings at the time, "Jeez, what a fixation about Iraq." In April 2002, Bush advised Condoleezza Rice that he was prepared to move against Saddam. Did he advise Powell? When did Powell learn what Bush had told Rice? Was he cut out?
In February 2003, Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Meyers briefed Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar on the Iraq war plans. Had they already briefed Powell? If he was cut out, what did he do subsequently?
On May 16, 2004, Powell stated on "Meet the Press" that his Feb. 5, 2003, presentation before the United Nations Security Council on weapons of mass destruction was inaccurate. When he agreed to make the administration's case, why did he take only two personal staffers (Col. Wilkerson and executive assistant Craig Kelly) to the CIA to review what Cheney, Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz had prepared and/or distorted, instead of bringing knowledgeable members of his own intelligence service, the State Department Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR), to protect him?
On Feb. 5, 2004, I quoted Greg Thielman, former director of the Strategic, Proliferation and Military Affairs Office of INR, in Salon: "He didn't have anyone from INR near him. Powell didn't want to know what was true or not. He wanted to sell a rotten fish. At some point, Powell decided there was no way to avoid war. His job was to go to war with as much legitimacy as we could scrape up." Why did Powell cut out his own people to his own ultimate detriment?
The documentary "No End in Sight" depicts the creation of the multivolume "Future of Iraq" study prepared by Powell's State Department staff for the reconstruction of Iraq after the war. When Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz rejected the study and blackballed Powell's staff, what did he do to counter them, if anything?
Eventually, history will answer these questions. But in September, Bush will attempt to impose his endgame for Iraq, a continuation of his policy, until he hands off the disaster to his successor. Petraeus is Bush's agent, just as Powell had been. Bush and his White House dread the "mockery" of Powell's "horrible shadow." If Powell remains silent in September it will be his last act of acquiescence as a spectral being.
Haunted by Banquo's ghost, Macbeth says, "If charnel-houses and our graves must send/ Those that we bury back, our monuments/ Shall be the maws of kites." And when Banquo's ghost vanishes, still plagued with the guilt of Banquo's murder, Macbeth cries out: "Hence, horrible shadow! Unreal mockery, hence!"
-Sydney Blumenthal
© 2007 Salon.com
35 Comments so far
Show AllThe real Colin Powell helped to cover up the My Lai massacre and was one of the key architcts of the Reagan administration's bloody policies in Central America. He oversaw the bombing of Iraq's water and sewage treatment plants. When asked how many Iraqis died in the first Gulf War he replied "Frankly, that number doesn't interest me."
He is hardly the tragicly flawed hero many paint him to be. Simply a war criminal with a slightly more rational outlook than the rest of the cabal.
Oh please, painting colin powell as some poor, ill-used martyr who was ruined and tossed away? File this article under fiction. Colin powell stood in front of the UN and lied through his teeth to make the case for this criminal invasion like the good lackey he was-Harry Belafonte was right about powell.
He lied and he knew at the time that he was lying. He actually made them cover up Picasso's Guernica mural because even he could not stand the hypocrisy of standing in front of one of the world's most famous anti-war statements and arguing for this obscenely criminal war.
Telling the truth about all of this is the least he can do. Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, the dead and wounded soldiers and the rest of the world it is much too little and much too late. People have literally been dying for the truth since this war began. He should go to jail with the rest of the bush junta.
seandonahuepoet August 9th, 2007 1:35 pm
CORRECT....like so many in this administration dig deep enough and you find genuine villains and/or paid guns for hire by the Military Industrial Media Warmongering Machine/ Complex....
Colin Powell is the criminal Bush regime's vastly over-estimated, volunteer lawn jockey. Sad, this man. And, equally, beneath contempt.
Here's the text of General Powell's February 5, 2003, address to the UN. It says everything that needs saying. And four years on, it's just sad.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/transcripts/powelltext_020503.html
i think that a prerequisite for judgeship or high-level government positions nowadays is a big ghost in the closet. how else can they control the lackeys without some big,dark secret held over their heads for blackmail purposes. just threaten to speak up and they immediately pull out the old college pics of the homosexual affair or of the crime you commited that would be the ruin of you. i can think of no other way they would be able to get away with the atrocities and thievery done in the name of the american nation. and with the spying of citizens condoned the situation will only get worse
Powell will never stand up. He prefers being on his knees.
Hoa binh
Will the real Clown Powell fetch Masa Bush a cold Mint Julep?
I loved his standup routine at the UN in 2002
mobile labs in trucks, flying monkey drones...he really slayed em
Oh my, a 'blot' on his career. Oh how sad. I think I'm gonna cry.
Too bad that thanks to him there are a million fewer people on this planet to pat his head and tell him he's forgiven. Or to buy his book.
Attention: Sydney Blumenthal
Sir, your boss, Bill Clinton, lost this poster with bombing Belgrade, the capital city of the only country that offered first resistance to Nazi Germany in 1941.
Since then I have never asked where is real Bill Clinton - he was here for everybody to see.
With this essay you lost me finally. No more reading and discussion of lil' Sydney. Man who is trying to understand fake is a fake himself. Do expect American generals, Colin Powell included, to line up with crocodile tears and fake explanations on the manner so familiar with their Wehrmacht counterparts. They all claim innocence and expressed outrage for being duped with their stupid but once beloved Leaders.
Yet, all of them were yes men; all of them had planned for blitzkrieg; all of them did not take into account such little thing as people's indignity; all of them brought disasters to their respectful countries.
What an irony - Hitler valued very high Nordic race of American Union as he called the USA. He was fond of eugenics, highly popular in the USA at that time and fashioned his racial policies after American eugenics ideologues, euthanasia included. In its divinely inspired reciprocity, the USA used widely Nazi secret service men, and Heller, former top rank officer form Abwehr, became VIP in newly formed CIA.
Now, colin powells of to day employ blitzkrieg theory, which always failed Germany and will fail its adapted homeland once again.
German people paid dearly for narrow mindedness of their leaders. So will us.
The appearance of Powell's former aides and confidantes in that documentary suggests that he may be--not so secretly--aching for a chance to combine revenge with whatever measure of vindication still available to him, by exposing the sham of the White House spin bombardment sure to accompany the release of Petraeus's September report. Hopefully Sidney can help tweak his conscience enough to get him to act, because the stakes couldn't be higher.
Without question, the wing of the ruling class that Bush represents are the scum of the earth. They hope to use the "stabbed in the back/snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" narrative against the Dems as a springboard to return to power in 2012, or even retain it in 2008. We can't let that happen. Period.
Powell is one of the only figures in the country, since he has the unique credibility of a former high-ranking insider, who is capable of driving a stake-of-truth through the Bush/Cheney/Rove Junta's neoconservative, vampire heart. Let us hope his own ghost--the ghost of Colin Powell the most respected man in America--will prod him forth to do what has to be done.
I don't feel a bit sorry for Colin Powell. He should have resigned in 2003 as soon as Iraqi WMDs failed to turn up.
As Lady MacBeth said, "who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him."
Colin who? Oh, this gutless, spineless uncle Tom, who sold us a bunch of lies?
Whatever he has done, Powell does command the respect of many Americans. Now that he has been out of reach of Boss Cheney's mind control, it is possible he is thinking on a more human level. I can only say this without laughing since hearing Dr. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University talk about how good people come to do evil things when they become part of a power structure. I could forgive much if he came out with the truth on the matter of bush's lies (what the US Army's victims can forgive, is up to them).
Colin Powell, a perfect example of 'running with the hares and hunting with the hounds' An Uncle Tom par excellence.
If the question is, what do you think of the character of Colin Powell, or if the Iraq war were ended, no others started, and Colin Powell were in the dock, I'd be with seandonahuepoet. But PRECISELY because of the horror to which so many posters here have referred, it's my view that sitting in judgment of Colin Powell is a self-indulgent moral error. The point on which those who -- like me -- share the views of militantliberal and Citizen1 should focus is how to put Powell to use in an effort to end more quickly than otherwise the hell that Bush and his minions have perpetrated, are perpetrating, and seemingly plan to continue perpetrating -- on an ever larger scale. Making angry statements regarding his culpability is not going to end the war, or prevent its expansion. If removing the "blot" on his reputation can be a motivation for Powell to join Lawrence Wilkerson, Richard Armitage and Barbara Bodine, GOOD! If Sydney Blumenthal can help motivate Powell to oppose the war and demand its end, GOOD. Too much evil is being done, too much more is threatened, and denunciations of Colin Powell on blog sites too utterly inconsequential to altering the course of that evil, for us to permit ourselves to engage in such ineffectual displays of our own moral righteousness.
Powell was a lying sycophant before strapping on the knee pads for the Loonitary Decider and against America, and he still is, except now it pays way better. If he were to appear as a witness at a trial, his credibility would be shredded faster than balsa in a wood chipper. It'd be like expecting the truth from John Gotti, or Rupert Murdoch, or Lewis Libby, or any loyalbushie, even when indicted and subpoenaed.
Powell's conscience bothering him finally? Good - go turn yourself into the Hague and take the pain, soldier.
Can somebody please tell me why Armitage outted Valarie Plame to Novak? And then wasn't prosecuted? I never got that part of the Libby trial.....
About Powell - I will never forgive him for all that he has done. That is an issue between him and his god. The only thing I would say is that coming clean now, and telling all he knows, may help him make ammends to his maker when the time comes.
Better late than never.......
Hector hits a homer.
All you can do with hatred is demonize, deny and possibly disillusion. While the last two can be useful in the present epoch, they're nowhere near enough.
Colin might be able to cough up something useful. Don't focus on how gross that image is!
"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have..." There was a kernel of truth in that disingenuous Rummism.
Will the real Colin Powell stand up? There is no real Powell, just like there is no real Bush. Why are you looking for a hero to save us? He did what he was told. You go to war with the bogus justification you have, not the bogus justification you might want to have.
If there is one thing I've learned in the past few years, its that being right means nothing in politics, having power means everything. Are the people who were right about the lies more powerful today than they were in 2002? Will Al Gore ever be known as anything more than the guy who lost? Technically he won the election, but "technically" means nothing. Powell is likewise a "loser", he's the guy who got pushed out by the neocons. People who resign in protest mean nothing. I have the highest regard for those few people like Ann Wright and Brady Kiesling who resigned over the Iraq war, but their action means nothing, has no impact.
Generals who retire and then speak out mean nothing. They are "has beens". If a general wants his action to mean something, he can't resign, he has to give his troops the order to withdraw and start loading them into ships to go home. He has to draw a line in the sand and beg to be court-martialed for insubordination. Only this would expose the fact that Bush does not actually listen to the generals.
We can't change this country except via people who have power within the established system. That's the way things work here. In 2000, there were three stolen elections in the world. In the other two cases, the people took to the streets in protest. In the US, the people watched their tvs to see how it would turn out.
I don't think we can put our faith in generals. They are even less likely than Democrats to do something.
Sorry to be so negative but you're barking up the wrong tree here.
Blumenthal is an intelligent analyst and elegant writer but he's a liberal Democrat, a Clintonite to his marrow, and it's only natural that some of the readers of Common Dreams would grow annoyed with his eulogy and lament for Colin Powell.
Powell has served Bush the same way that Albert Speer served the Nazis. Speer was extraordinarily brilliant and admirable in many ways, but ultimately he served the Nazi state, the war machine, and Hitler.
Powell is an intelligent man with a good deal of charisma but as many readers duly note, he does not deserve sympathy. He has been a lackey for the U.S. military and economic empire (and consider the record of his loathsome son at the FCC), and he certainly lied at the UN when he championed the invasion for the Cheney cabal.
Although Powell is undeserving of our sympathy, Hector makes a good deal of sense. If Blumenthal can inspire Powell to step out of the shadows and challenge the escalation and legitimacy of the Iraq war, then that's for the good. It's about saving Iraqi and American lives now, and if Powell can somehow help shorten the war then we should support that.
However, it seems unlikely Powell will do anything courageous or important. I think he long ago betrayed the truth and the American people. (Not to mention the multitude of victims of American militarism-- from Vietnam to Iraq—which he has helped to kill.)
Nonetheless, I can't censure Blumenthal for trying this stunt if it has any chance, no matter how remote, of shortening the war.
Leaving all the racist rhetoric aside ... the truth is Powell was just another 'establishment' sycophant who was placed on a pedestal to appease the 'white mans' guilt. It is shameful that despite knowing fully well that his information was wrong (remember his tantrum the previous night) he still lied shamelessly for his masters and basically enabled the death warrant for a million Iraqis.
As for
"standing by stepping forward at the crucial hour. "
Do they really think this 'September Report' is going to change anything ? How deluded ARE these fucks anyway ?
Hints at racism are unfair here as the racists are the people that Powell served for all those years.
He deserves nothing but scorn.
Anyone see Condi recently?????
Anybody out there among our readership actually belives that ANYONE rises to be a General or whatever rank MISTER Powell achieved does so based on MERIT and GOOD deeds, and INTEGRITY?
For Sale, One Country Going Cheap, Owner will Finance.
When the moment comes you either do the right thing or you do not. Colin Powell did not and deserves no respect, sympathy, or consideration. He knew his U.N. performance was a charade yet he did it with gusto.
By the way Hector, there is nothing on this earth that is going to shorten our stay in Iraq, except possibly the complete collapse of this country, or maybe you haven't been listening to the Democratic front-runners.
FRESH 1 & DINGO: Good points!
Powell has shown he will be the good soldier and keep his mouth shut. Shut until just the right book deal comes along that is...
To be fair to Powell: neither he nor the vast majority of Democrats realized that Bush would be such a disaster for the country.
Powell was the only sensible adult in the crowd of Bush neo-cons, and he almost surely had a restraining effect on some of their worst impulses. You have to remember that Pat Robertson--like all Bushies--despised Powell, which means he couldn't have been all bad.
Colon Powell ? I thought that was a very messy and deadly form of cancer ? No way to excuse the fact that he lied about WMD's and set the war crimes in motion. Interesting fact...they covered up the Guernica painting at the U.N when Colon was setting the stage for "Shock And Awe". Fascism and civilan deaths all over again. Even more tragic is that Colon and Condy have betrayed African-Americans by doing the dirty work of Bush Inc. via racist warfare against Iraqis and working-poor Americans.
You people mostly have it dead wrong. Powell supports affirmative action, has never been a neo con. The fact those so close to him are speaking out shows he's never been with the neo cons. Any secretary of state or other administration official except for the vice president is there at the discretion of the president. Get real! Powell also opposed Bill Klanton on the crazy, damn US/NATO anything but humanitarian intervention which effectively destroyed the Owen Vance Peace Plan, the only sane hope at that point for preventing needless ethnic cleansing, rape, and all the other needless bloodshed and deaths, overwhelmingly not British or American, thus in the USA and the UK, not near enough concern was there to stop or start stop this madness.
Powell has also opposed outright the damn, swine AIPAC crowd and their kill crazy policies toward the Palestinians.
Most of you need to read some history other that hot air dished out in the USA. Read
"Balkan Odyssey," Lord Owen memoir about the Balkan crisis for a start even though he did support limited US military intervention, but not on the scale that occurred.
Powell told the real story of the Iraq threat in a public forum with the Foreign Minister of Egypt on February 24, 2001.
Note especially the last two sentences in light of his lying UN presentation in 2003.
"We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/933.htm
Oh. One more thing. The sanctions he praises killed about 500,000 Iraqi children according to Unicef.
"Ms. Bellamy noted that if the substantial reduction in child mortality throughout Iraq during the 1980s had continued through the 1990s, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under-five in the country as a whole during the eight year period 1991 to 1998."
http://www.unicef.org/newsline/99pr29.htm
Vince Lawrence writes of Colin Powell,
"When the moment comes you either do the right thing or you do not. Colin Powell did not and deserves no respect, sympathy, or consideration. He knew his U.N. performance was a charade yet he did it with gusto."
With all due respect, I don't think that whether Colin Powell "deserves . . . respect, sympathy, or consideration" is the most important question facing those of us who, like VL and me, are opposed to the actions of the US, at home and abroad. The most important question, in my view (pace VL's second point, about which more in a moment), is, "What can be done to stop those actions?" Whatever the odds might be that Colin Powell will attempt to stop them, any effort on his part to stop them is far more likely to be effective than any action of mine (or, I suspect, of VL's). That is why, without any illusions, my sympathy is with those actions that attempt to bring Powell in on the side of right and decency.
As to any such efforts, by anyone, to end the Iraq war, Vince Lawrence further writes, "there is nothing on this earth that is going to shorten our stay in Iraq, except possibly the complete collapse of this country, or maybe you haven't been listening to the Democratic front-runners." The "Democratic front runners" cause me, if anything, more grief than the Bush administration, because I cannot understand their actions except as a response to fear for their own congressional seats, and I cannot, in that context, see of what they are afraid. The press runs "off the record" accounts of Congressional Democrats explaining their FISA vote as fear of being labeled "soft on terrorism". Of WHOM are these people afraid? This is not January 1968. It is not October 1991, or even June 2003. Perhaps there will yet be a "firestorm" of the intensity as that sparked by Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre. Perhaps there will not be. In any event, I certainly hold no candle for any of the Democratic front runners, or for most of the Democrats in Congress. Frankly, that is PRECISELY why, in my view, it is clear that we simply CANNOT AFFORD to sit at our computers and compete with each other for most ferocious, most clever denunciation of the likes of Powell and Blumenthal. And, without personal animus, it does not seem laudable to me to sit at the safety of a computer terminal and write, with what strikes me as unjustified condescension toward those who still looking for a way to change things, that "there is nothing on this earth that is going to shorten our stay in Iraq, except possibly the complete collapse of this country". VL, don't give up. If Powell is not your hope, or if you simply cannot stomach him, look for someone or something else. But don't quit on us. We're in this together.
Colin Powell is a war criminal.
WILL THE REAL COLIN POWELL SIT DOWN AND SHUT UP.
Here, let me plug the chair in for ya, Mr Powell!
Bill Klanton and Al Gore were both big time war criminals on the Balkans crisis. They both had the hots for confronatational, NATO military action against Yugoslavia to break up the last Communist country in Europe, and they pretty much succeeded over the dead bodies of people in the Balkans, while insuring the maximum amount of rape, pillaging, and killing by the different factions along with all the ethnic cleansing that Gore and Kkanton raised so much hell about for so long during those days. Gore and Klanton torpedoed the Vance Owen peace plan (VOPP), which held out a significant hope for reducing the terrible atrocities in the Balkans, but both Gore and Klanton were too busy beating the drums of war and attacking the EU for not jumping into military action against Yugoslavia, which without any real justification as the Croatian and Bosnian separatists engaged in just as horrible, if not worse, atrocities against the ethnic Serbs and carried out big time ethnic cleansing against them. John Major, the British Conservative prime minister at the time was probably much closer to being right in opposing this BS, but so was Colin Powell.
Also Klanton got us into Somalia to carry out a regime change to put in a puppet government favorable to US business interest and lied like hell about it.