Thursday, October 20, 2005

Republican "moderation", Colin Powell style

It's nice to see that Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, is speaking out about the problems of the Bush administration and its foreign policy.  Kevin Drum has details and links: The Oval Office Cabal .... Political Animal blog (10/20/05).

I'm afraid I can't be overly impressed about this, though.  Supposedly, Powell is very upset with his long-time associate Wilkerson because he is speaking out publicly this way.  That's our great Republican moderates for you.  They're really not quite so radical as the Bush hardliners, you see.  They just think it would be bad form to say so out loud.  How impolite it would be to actually try to change destructive policies!

But I can't help but wonder if this isn't just a part of the continuing campaign to bolster Powell's thoroughly tarnished reputation.  "Tarnished" is putting it mildly.  "Ruined" describes it better, as far as I'm concerned.  Powell used his prestige to promote and defend Bush's preventive war against Iraq.  He lied to the UN and to the American people to promote their great Mesopotamian crusade.

So what use is his "moderation" now?

In his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (2005), George Packer describes Colin Powell's last official meeting with Bush, as he was leaving his office as Secretary of State.  It was just Powell, Bush and Bush's chief of staff Andy Card there.  It's not entirely clear from his account whether Card stayed for the entire meeting, but it sounds like Powell was alone with Bush for most of the conversation.

Here is Packer's account:

[In January 2005,] Colin Powell was summoned to the White House for his farewell conversation with the president. All along, Powell had been the dutifully quiet dissenter on Iraq, concerned about the damage to alliances, skeptical (but not enough) of the administration's more fevered claims about weapons and terrorism, realistic about the difficulties of the postwar. But his prestige was badly tarnished when his prewar speech to the UN about Iraqi weapons was proved mostly false. Though Iraq became more and more the responsibility of his agency, Powell had lost almost every major fight back when the crucial decisions were made. His tenure as secretary of state was a great disappointment. ...

After a few awkward minutes in the Oval Office, Powell realized that Bush had no idea what his secretary of state was doing there. The White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, was summoned, but he. too, was clueless. Who had called for the meeting? It began to seem entirely possible that the phantom vice president had arranged one more parting humiliation for his old colleague and more recent neme-sis. Powell drew himself up and informed the president that he had come not for their weekly meeting but to say goodbye. Finding himself alone with Bush for perhaps the last time, Powell decided to speak his mind without constraint. The Defense Department had too much power in shaping foreign policy, he argued, and when Bush asked for an example, Powell offered not Rumsfeld, the secretary who had mastered him bureaucratically, not Wolfowitz, the point man on Iraq, but the department's number three official, Douglas Feith, whom Powell called a card-carrying member of the Likud Party. Warming to his talk, Powell moved on to negotiations with North Korea, and then homed in on Iraq: If, by April 1, the situation there had not improved significantly, the president would need a new strategy and new people to implement it. Bush looked taken aback: No one ever spoke this way in the Oval Office. But because it was the last time, Powell ignored every cue of displeasure and kept going until he had said what he had to say, what he perhaps should have said long before.

Historians will no doubt search the records and conduct interviews in the future to try to verify this little anecdote.  But if Bush and Powell (and maybe Card) were the only ones in the room, I would say it's a safe bet that this particular account came from Powell.  It's pretty obviously self-serving.

It also strikes me as unlikely.  Douglas Feith is certainly one of the main movers in getting up the Iraq War.  But Packer hints at the oddity of the story.  If Powell were going to have a last-minute outpouring of boldness or candor, is all he could come up with that Feith is a jerk and that if things don't get better in Iraq in two or three months, maybe you should think about making some changes?

But Powell's candor and boldness hasn't yetincluded a forthright public criticism of what went wrong about the Iraq War.  On the other hand, what would he say that could make up for his disgraceful conduct as Secretary of State in whipping up a war based on lies?

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