For more than three years, former Secretary of State Colin Powell has been backtracking about what he told the nation and the world in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. Trouble is, the man who was once the only person in the Bush Administration that mainstream critics claimed to trust has increasing difficulties keeping his stories straight.
Now Powell has told an audience of "public intellectuals" that he spent two-and-a-half hours trying to talk his boss out of invading Iraq, as first reported by the Sunday Times today.
"I tried to avoid this war," Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. "I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers."
Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. "The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms," he said. "It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now."
He added: "It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States." All the military could do, Powell suggested, was put "a heavier lid on this pot of boiling sectarian stew".
Two-and-a-half hours of secret advice to the President that Powell just now seems to recall after four-and-a-half years? Advice that he says he gave, but that doesn't quite jibe with what he was saying a couple of years ago after he left the Administration? As is clear from this interview with ABC:
"I'm always a reluctant warrior. And I don't resent the term, I admire the term, but when the president decided that it was not tolerable for this regime to remain in violation of all these U.N. resolutions, I'm right there with him with the use of force," he said.
Powell told Walters he is unfazed by criticism that he put loyalty to the president over leadership. "Loyalty is a trait that I value, and yes, I am loyal. And there are some who say, 'Well, you shouldn't have supported it. You should have resigned.' But I'm glad that Saddam Hussein is gone. I'm glad that that regime is gone," he said.
When Walters pressed Powell about that support, given the "mess" that the invasion has yielded, Powell said, "Who knew what the whole mess was going to be like?"
Who knew, Mr. Secretary? Ye gods. The best you could do was offer the excuse of every Administration apologist since September 11, 2001?
And yet you now claim you did try to tell Mister Bush there might be a mess?
But then this has been your M.O. since you left the Administration, always trying to have things both ways. Forget it. We're sick of it. We're sick of you.
How does the alleged 150 minutes of truth you delivered to Mister Bush compare with the 85-minute multimedia presentation full of lies you gave to the United Nations on February 5, 2003? A presentation in which you claimed:
"I cannot tell you everything that we know. But what I can share with you, when combined with what all of us have learned over the years, is deeply troubling."
You subsequently said you were sorry that your reputation was tarnished by that war-is-the-only-answer anthrax-and-nukes presentation. But you blamed low-level government employees for their failure to object to the vetting of questionable intelligence from questionable sources. You could not bring yourself to say it was the higher-ups who failed, Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney pushing their agenda. Nah. It was the grunts, who, despite what two government whitewashes have claimed, were under intense pressure to give their bosses exactly what they demanded: justification for war.
But this, of course, was just your loyalty at work. What you also didn't say in that faux mea culpa was how you intentionally ignored evidence about the infamous aluminum tubes that you were directly provided by Greg Thielmann of your very own intelligence bureau. In other words, you didn't just pass along claims you had been misinformed about by the Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal, you told the Security Council something you perfectly well knew to be a f'n lie.
Despite your differences with the administration, you told ABC in September 2005 that
you never considered resigning in protest. "I'm not a quitter. And it wasn't a moral issue, or an act of a failure of an active leadership. It was knowing what we were heading into, and when the going got rough, you don't walk out."
That says it all. To imagine that some otherwise smart people once thought what a good, bipartisan President Colin Powell would make. Instead, you're just another ex-capo trying to present yourself in the early twilight of the Bush Administration as a capon. As if that is an improvement.
On the day you gave your presentation to the United Nations Security Council, Picasso's 1937 antiwar masterpiece, Guernica, was covered with a blue drape. Covered up because it was hanging right over where Security Council members would stop and speak before TV cameras. "It was decided the violent anti-war images would not be the fitting backdrop for talk of a new war," wrote William Walker of the Toronto Star.
You claim, Mr. Secretary, to have had objections to going into Iraq. But not enough to resign when these were ignored. You claim you wouldn't have declared publicly what you did had you known the truth. But we know you didn't merely have bad information. You lied. You claim that you urged the President not to invade. But you enabled that invasion 100%.
As Laurie Brereton, Australian Labour Member of Parliament and U.N. delegation member said about the covered Guernica:
"Innocent Iraqis — men, women and children — will pay a terrible price. And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that."
That was 53 months ago. In the interim, the invasion and occupation have tallied hundreds of thousands dead, a million or so maimed, two million exiled, two million displaced, diplomacy in ruins, trillions of dollars wasted, America hated around the planet. Thanks so very much, Mr. Secretary.
You, sir, are a coward and a cur. And it's too late for all your clumsy backpedaling ever to change that.
