… continues his pattern now by saying sensible things on Gitmo,
along with this backhanded acknowledgement of the economics that drive our Prison-Industrial Complex:
“there are some prison facilities in the United States, and we were looking at this years ago, who are anxious to get these folks into their unused prisons or their almost vacant prisons."
Powell has stated that the Republican Party has lost its way on immigration. Powell’s most visible post-retirement position was to endorse Obama in 2008 and 2012, which Republican ‘thought’ leaders demeaned as being purely a result of racial solidarity between two African-American men. Despite this, Powell recently said:
“I'm still a Republican because I believe in a strong defense, because I believe in the entrepreneurial spirit that is so typical of the Republican Party in the past.”
All these positions suggest that Powell would be a natural endorser of Hillary, except for the following problem:
During Powell’s long career of over-respecting the US military chain of command, from the My Lai cover-up to the fabricated invasion-justifying assertion that Saddam Hussein was rushing towards acquiring weapons of mass destruction, the out-of-character event on which Powell most-visibly disrespected that chain of command was in publicly resisting newly elected President Bill Clinton’s proposal to remove the US military’s policy on expelling Gay military personnel.
Later, when then then-retired Powell announced that he was a Republican, and made personal responsibility the center-piece of his public profile. It does not take much imagination to infer that Powell’s close-up look at Bill Clinton, as the archetype new Democrat, persuaded him that the Republican Party was the only place for somebody prioritizing this value.
My takeaway: Absence of a Hillary endorsement by Powell speaks loudly, again about Bill, and now also about Hillary.
Being an influential thought leader, as Powell seems to aspire to, carries responsibility to do more than cherry-pick issues to comment on.
About Powell’s own place in history, and the “blot” on his “record” that he acknowledges, I hope that he does not wait as long, as Robert McNamara on Vietnam decision-making, to admit the depths of dysfunction at the highest levels of US foreign policy and military decision-making.
A way to do this now, and make a difference for our troubled country, would be to publicly acknowledge the legitimacy and far-reaching nature of Bernie Sanders’ critiques of US politics and foreign and domestic policy. Anything less amounts to rank hypocrisy, in view of the US military, where Powell spent his career, being the world’s most successful example of internal socialist policies, and near the top of the list of institutions that consume the most corruptly allocated money.
Eisenhower made this kind of public break with group-think and peer pressure when Powell was 23 years old. What the hell is Powell (approaching his 79th birthday) waiting for?