An interview with Colin Powell by Barbara Walters will air tonight on ABC, and the New York Times has some excerpts today.
The former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, says in a television interview to be broadcast Friday that his 2003 speech to the United Nations, in which he gave a detailed description of Iraqi weapons programs that turned out not to exist, was "painful" for him personally and would be a permanent "blot" on his record.
While Powell laments how painful it is to have been the one who sat in the UN and made statements about Iraq that were false, I'm not buying his act that he was "devastated" about being misled by intelligence agents who didn't inform him that the information was unreliable.
Come on. Colin Powell was by far the smartest person in any room he entered, and he was the only one in the Bush administration who ever bothered to ask questions that bucked the party line. To believe that he was unaware of the many serious questions about the accuracy of the information he was presenting on Iraq is ridiculous.
Powell acknowledges the importance he places on loyalty, and this is the only reasonable explanation for not only the Iraq debacle, but for his toeing the line so many times while it was obvious to everyone that he disagreed with what Bush was up to.
And that's why I don't respect Colin Powell. When an issue of such importance is before you (as the runup to the war obviously was), you don't place your loyalty to a flunkie who finagled his way into being president over your loyalty to the United States of America.
Powell is right about the "blot" on his record. Everything good he's ever done, and there's been plenty, is overshadowed by his willingness to be the stooge for BushCo.
(And that goes for you, too, John McCain.)