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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (173537)	10/29/2005 1:21:13 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Respond to of 281500

Noel, I agree that Powell was trying to change things from the inside but that's not enough. When he knew that he had a dysfunctional administration that was on the brink of initiating a war that he believed was likely to result in disaster, when he knew that the case for that war was being hyped, when he knew that he wasn't going to be able to derail the process, what did he do? He got on board. That's unforgivable. He had the opportunity to stand up and take a bullet to save his men but he played the "good soldier" instead. The one man with the ability to have effectively presented the public case against war got along by going along. In fact, he did more than that, he actually helped them articulate the case for war once the decision had been made. But that's not all. The "Powell doctrine" was to use overwhelming force to accomplish the "victory" and he was strongly supportive of the State Dept view that the aftermath of the war would create a huge problem. Men like Shinsecki sacrificed their careers to try to present the realist arguments concerning the aftermath of "victory." Powell, however, stood by almost silently and allowed the Defense dept to wage war on "the cheap," and also to mismanage the occupation. In the end he strongly supported Bush for a second term and, even after being forced out by Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush and replaced by a fool in Rice, he's still the "good soldier." And, of course, his right wing son is the head of the federal agency that monitors the nations media and he still has dinner with Bush so he's still getting carrots. This is not "profiles in courage" behavior. This is the behavior of a man who knew better but lacked the courage and the passion to stand up and say, "I will not be party to policies drafted by a dysfunctional Administration in secret meetings that fail to even consider the input of dissenting experts and I will not allow my country to become hijacked by a handful of narrow-viewed ideologues when those policies harm my nation and send my soldiers to wasted deaths. And that's too bad because he's a good man, and bright. But, as I said earlier, that's not enough. Ed