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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (40244)	3/22/2004 5:28:01 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Yes, the hard-liners have outflanked and humiliated Colin Powell. But don't feel sorry for him. He has no one to blame but himself. prospect.org <<...If there's a tragedy here, it's one mostly of Powell's making. For all their success in cutting Powell down to size, Cheney and company have not altered one basic fact: Bush needs Powell more than Powell needs him. Powell could have crippled the administration had he quit at any point in the last two years. Given his immense clout, he was in a position to raise important doubts about the administration's course on Iraq. In choosing not to confront Bush with his concerns, he not only failed his president; he failed the country. But even if Powell had spoken up, it's not clear what he could have offered Bush beyond procedural advice and critique. When Bill Keller asked him to describe his worldview back in the fall of 2001, the secretary of state answered with "an articulate and utterly uncontroversial discourse" that Keller aptly described as "uplifting nonpartisan boilerplate." Powell will get you where you want to go, but someone else has to provide the road map. On the most critical issue confronting the United States, the rise of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, Powell helped Bush implement a course of action conceived by the neocons. What he didn't do -- because he couldn't -- was propose a different course of action that might have led to the same goal of political reform in the Arab world but that wouldn't have involved waging an unpopular war on a trumped-up pretext, a war that has extracted an enormous cost in American lives and American prestige. Bush, by most accounts, is an impressionable sort -- "malleable," as one Bush family friend uncharitably puts it -- but selling him on an alternative vision would have required actually having one, which Powell plainly did not. That alternative vision -- hardheaded about the dangers facing the U.S. but aware that the war on terrorism can't be won without international cooperation -- will have to wait for a Kerry administration...>>