Something is rotten in the state

Actual logo from the White House web page for Colin Powell's UN presentation:



When Colin Luther Powell sold himself and his country down the East River, it was a tragedy worthy of the Bard himself.

Is this anthrax which I see before me?
The vial in my hand? Come, let me hype thee.
I have thee not, and yet the media see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, senseless
Like feelings about satellite photos' sight? or art thou but
A mobile WMD lab of the mind, a false creation,
Repeated by the ratings-obsessed brainless?

I come not to bury Powell, but not to praise him, either.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's former Chief of Staff, now calls the presentation "a hoax." He blames the fraudulence not on his ex-boss, but on a politicized intelligence process.

Indeed, it does appear that warnings of widely known flaws in the presentation's source materials were kept from Powell's desk, and that at every step of the evidence-gathering process it was well-understood that only one conclusion was acceptable to the White House and the Pentagon.

Former CIA European Chief Tyler Drumheller:

I had warned the CIA deputy John McLaughlin that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey Boss, be careful with that German report [about informer Curve Ball's claims]. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Don't worry about that."

I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy.

The one CIA agent who met (and who didn't believe) Curve Ball was told...

"Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say. The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."

Also, I don't doubt that Powell tried to rationalize a defensible route through the shoals of subterfuge, parsing away until he had pausible deniability for most everything he said. If there was no true smoking gun in Saddam Hussein's hand, there best not be one in Powell's either.

But as Al Smith observed, "no matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." Given what was at stake, it's fair to say that Powell and Wilkerson were criminally willing to suspend their disbelief:

Powell allegedly told the Foreign Secretary that he had just about "moved in" with his intelligence staff to prepare for his speech but had left his briefings "apprehensive," fearing that the evidence might "explode in their faces." A U.S. News & World Report story describes the Secretary of State throwing the documents in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit!" But the good soldier read it anyway.

It didn't take hindsight for someone with the least bit of skepticism — especially the presentation's preparer and deliverer — to see that the speech was full of speculation, convenient rewording, silly military-fantasy drawings worthy of Bruce McCall, and more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire.

If only Powell lov'd Caesar less and lov'd Rome more:

Powell... "is the world's most loyal soldier." Wilkerson said he admired that, but he took a different view of loyalty: not to the administration, but to the country.

Even if they protest their innocence too much, they at least understand it's a damned, unwashable spot on their hands.

Wilkerson:

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

Powell:

It's a blot. I'm the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It's painful now.

Why was it painful? Perhaps because he knew it was wrong.

What makes Powell's role so tragic is his equivocation, the sense that at some level he knew he was carrying heavy water for some very dangerous fools:

I wonder what we'll do if we put half a million troops on the ground in Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and don't find a single weapon of mass destruction.

There's no evidence of such pause from those who drove the administration's policy and the determination to sex-up the evidence. To Wilkerson, that means in particular Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he sees as hijackers of the ship of state:

Wilkerson blamed Bush, "not versed in international relations and not too much interested," for letting the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal to take over. He blamed Rice for dropping her role as honest broker to "build her intimacy with the president." And he blamed whoever gave Feith "carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself."

The cabal's end run around the bureaucracy, he argued, stalled nuclear diplomacy with North Korea and Iran. He said top officials "condoned" prisoner abuse and left the Army "truly in bad shape."

"You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences," he said, "whether it was a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or the situation in Iraq which still goes unexplained."

Rumsfeld fully understood that there was no there there behind the sudden rush to war (again from Charles Hanley, who also authored this 2/7/03 AP report showing that sites Powell fear-mongered about had been thoroughly inspected and found free of WMDs):

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. senators [in July, 2003] the Bush administration actually had no "dramatic new evidence" before ordering the Iraq invasion.

For a war rationale, the Vice President had nothin' either, beyond championing a geographically quixotic application of the "9/11 changes everything" meme and willing to life non-existent connections between our forgotten enemy Al-Qaeda and his forgotten $73 million customer Iraq.

On the plus side, Cheney has shown how amazingly right he once was about the hazards of invading Iraq:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is... fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shia government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President [George H.W. Bush] got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq.

Now Cheney sits in a rubber room and insists he'd never hurt a fly.

Ultimately, one must agree with both Powell and Harry Truman about where the buck stops, especially when it comes to that most dubious of propositions — a war of whim:

"The decisions that were made were not made by me or Mr. Cheney or Rumsfeld. They were made by the president of the United States."