Colin Powell Suicide Watch

After reading this brilliant editorial, A Doctrine Left Behind by Mark Danner in yesterday's Times, I'm more and more convinced that The Big Turd Sandwich chose Colin Powell to be his secretary of state not just as a cynical attempt to appear inclusive and moderate but to completely humiliate Powell in order to give Poppy the giant middle finger:

It seemed somehow fitting, and fittingly sad, that Colin Powell saw his resignation accepted as secretary of state on the day marines completed their conquest of Falluja, ensuring that the televised snapshots of glory drawn from his long public career would be interspersed with videotape of American troops presiding over scenes of urban devastation in a far-off and intractable war.

As I watched images from Mr. Powell's life flicker past, and as the fruits of the American victory became clear - a ravaged city; an elusive enemy, most of whom had escaped; a countrywide counterattack in which insurgents seized parts of Mosul - I felt a ghostly echo of words I could not quite grasp. Two days later, watching an American general declare that in Falluja our forces had "broken the back of the insurgency," I felt the sentences I'd struggled to recall suddenly take shape; I reached for Mr. Powell's memoir and found these bitter lines:

"Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses. ...Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand."

This is, of course, Colin Powell talking about his Vietnam war experience - an experience that led to the formulation of "The Powell Doctrine." Had The Big Turd Sandwich been serious about, well, anything, he might have actually listened to what his secretary of state had said in the past about waging war in Iraq:

No one can say how many lives could have been saved had the responsible officials asked the right questions. As it happens, those questions had been laid out with courage and clarity back in 1992, by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, Colin Powell. While the Powell Doctrine is generally thought simply to prescribe the setting of clear objectives and the use of overwhelming force to achieve them, it also sets out a series of questions that policymakers must ask and answer before committing American lives to war. They make sobering reading today:

"Is the political objective we seek to achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all other nonviolent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analyzed? How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?"

Faced with the war in Iraq, how might Mr. Powell have answered these questions? The main "political objective" the United States sought in Iraq, insofar as the president identified it, was to deprive Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction. These always ghostly objects have long since evaporated; and no matter how often administration officials repeat that the French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations also judged that Mr. Hussein had weapons, this will not change the recalcitrant fact that these parties did not accept that they posed enough of a threat to support an immediate war.

Second, had "all other nonviolent means failed" to disarm Mr. Hussein? Though the president is still fond of declaring, as he did in the first presidential debate, that "Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming," the rest of us have perhaps not entered too deeply into the post-factual age not to acknowledge what we now know: that in fact Saddam Hussein did disarm - and that the international inspectors on the scene, given time and sufficient diplomatic support, would eventually have confirmed this - just as David Kay, the administration's arms inspector, was able to do in the war's aftermath. As he allowed himself to say in a moment of near-suicidal honesty, in the matter of the weapons the Iraqis "were telling the truth."

But it is in posing his last several questions that the younger Mr. Powell becomes a truly heartbreaking figure - the questions about "gains and risks" and about consequences. How do we evaluate these? We can speak of the 1,200 Americans dead and 9,000 wounded, or even of the thousands of Iraqis who have died. But what objective do we weigh them against?

And finally: "How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?" The question is unflinching, but there is little evidence that the administration Secretary Powell served ever made a serious attempt to answer it. What would such an attempt have looked like? We know the answer; for in 1992 the general himself offered us an example of the "logical process" he had in mind, analyzing why President George H. W. Bush did not order our forces to take Baghdad in 1991:

"We must assume that the political objective of such an order would have been capturing Saddam Hussein," he wrote. "What purpose would it have served? And would serving that purpose have been worth the many more casualties that would have occurred? Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not."

Unfortunately for America Version 2004 we no longer have a reasonable person in charge. Our Big Turd Sandwich is a man who, when asked if he had consulted his reasonable father on going to war in Iraq, answered:

"He is the wrong father to appeal to for advice. The wrong father to go to, to appeal to in terms of strength. There's a higher Father that I appeal to."

How does one even begin to argue with "reason" like that? Sorry, but I've tried, and you cannot argue with someone who has a childlike faith in a higher Father. As Bob Herbert wrote in The Times last week:

As I watch the disastrous consequences of the Bush policies unfold - not just in Iraq, but here at home as well - I am struck by the immaturity of this administration, whatever the ages of the officials involved. It's as if the children have taken over and sent the adults packing. The counsel of wiser heads, like George H. W. Bush, or Brent Scowcroft, or Colin Powell, is not needed and not wanted.

Some of the world's most important decisions - often, decisions of life and death - have been left to those who are less competent and less experienced, to men and women who are deficient in such qualities as risk perception and comprehension of future consequences, who are reckless and dangerously susceptible to magical thinking and the ideological pressure of their peers.

I look at the catastrophe in Iraq, the fiscal debacle here at home, the extent to which loyalty trumps competence at the highest levels of government, the absence of a coherent vision of the future for the U.S. and the world, and I wonder, with a sense of deep sadness, where the adults have gone.

I know if I was Colin Powell, I'd be swallowing a whole bunch of pills and washing them down with some excellent single malt. But perhaps Colin sold his soul a long time ago and actually feels no remorse for allowing our men and women to die, unnecessarily, in Iraq. If that's the case, then I guess we should expect, instead of suicide, lots and lots of highly paid speaking engagements. And, of course, another friggin' book.