Powell, Colin
From Bwtm
A Closer Look at Colin Powell: The Evil of Banality
October 12, 2006 A new biography confirms that Colin Powell went along with the Iraq war because he was following orders. The tragic irony of the good soldier is that he deserted the people he was trying to protect.
In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to convince the UN Security Council of Iraq's alleged WMD program. He was unsuccessful.
On Sept. 19. 2005, eight months after Colin Powell resigned as George W. Bush's secretary of state, he gave a speech to the National War College. Afterward, an audience member asked him to explain whether he really supported the Iraq war and whether he had ever considered resigning. Powell replied that he had proposed trying diplomacy before going to war, and that Bush had agreed to try. Yet he had always known, he said, that Bush might decide to invade Iraq later. When Bush did, Powell said, "I supported him. I can't go on a long patrol and then say 'never mind.'" Powell concluded by saying that no, he had "never thought of resigning."
This story, which Karen DeYoung relates at the outset of "Soldier," her competent but constrained new biography of Powell, raises the crucial question that will forever hang over the career of America's most famous soldier: Why did he continue to give public support to a war that privately he had grave doubts about? In fact, the story also provides the answer. Powell's comparison of serving as secretary of state to going on a combat patrol says it all: He stayed on the Bush team because he was a loyal soldier, for whom resigning was not making a principled stand but deserting his post. Powell's decision cleared the way to a disastrous war, hideously bloody and apparently endless. The war, according to a new study from the Lancet, has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis so far, and the Army chief of staff has announced that he plans to keep the current level of U.S. troops in Iraq through 2010. But Powell seems incapable of grasping that he very likely could have stopped the war, and his biographer fails to sufficiently explore the issue.
Powell's military mind-set was the main reason he supported the war, but it wasn't the only reason. As DeYoung, an editor at the Washington Post, reveals, he was also a profoundly cautious man, not particularly ideological and not given to dramatic gestures or making waves. "He had risen steadily through the military and four administrations by maintaining a careful balance between deliberate prudence and intrepid competence," DeYoung writes. Powell's pride, and his past successes, also played a role. She notes that Powell "had been winning bureaucratic battles for so many years that he simply refused to acknowledge the extent of the losses he had suffered. Beyond his soldier's sense of duty, he saw even the threat of resignation as an acknowledgment of defeat. He was a proud man, and he would never have let them see him sweat." But the low-key professionalism that served him well in his illustrious military career proved a fatal impediment when it came to standing up to the radical ideologues in the Bush administration - or indeed in even recognizing what he was dealing with.
Unfortunately, none of these are exactly earth-shaking revelations. DeYoung brings nuance and psychological depth to her analysis, but most of us already believed Powell went along with the Iraq war mainly because he was a loyal soldier and a consummate bureaucratic survivor. It isn't DeYoung's fault that she is unable to advance the story: The simple fact is that there seems to be nothing else to say. Until he made the fatal mistake of joining the Bush administration, Powell's life story was inspiring to millions; his autobiography, "My American Journey," was a bestseller. But his story, alas, didn't end there. And its sad climax and depressing denouement is not only thoroughly uninspiring, it's not even very interesting - unless reading about a cautious executive's bureaucratic defeat is your idea of a good time. Of course, Powell's bureaucratic downfall had enormous consequences - but that still doesn't make it, or him, ultimately very interesting. Hannah Arendt coined the famous phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the Nazi war criminals on trial at Nuremberg; Powell's unfortunate saga might be called "the evil ofbanality."
Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni praised Powell for his ability to stay above the fray of office infighting, but added a darker note: "Powell is a pretty ambitious guy. I don't think it was in him to stop this by bringing down his president."
Powell is a sympathetic character, and DeYoung does a good job of allowing us to see the situation from his perspective. But Zinni's words are a reminder that the obedience of the soldier and the caution of the bureaucrat can also be self-serving -- and prevent one from doing what has to be done. There are higher duties than the military ones, or even the personal codes one lives by.
The tragic irony is that by failing to try to derail Bush's misguided war, Powell betrayed the very people he most wanted to protect: the soldiers. In "Plan of Attack," Woodward characterizes Powell's reaction to his fateful Jan. 13 meeting with Bush. "No way on God's earth could he walk away at that point. It would have been an unthinkable act of disloyalty to the president, to Powell's own soldier's code, to the United States military, and mostly to the several hundred thousand who would be going to war. The kids were the ones who fought, Powell often reminded himself."
Today, almost 3,000 of those kids are dead, many thousands more are shattered in mind and body, the number of dead Iraqis has passed 650,000 and the U.S. government wants to stay the course for at least four more years. Can Powell still believe that his act of "loyalty" was worthy of the name?
Just what Powell thinks about any of this these days is unclear. In a March 2005 interview with DeYoung, Powell rebuked media reports, "as he put it, that 'Powell must be so distraught.' 'Why am I distraught?' he said testily. 'We are working on our relationships ... look at what we've done with Russia, China, NATO, the E.U.'" And Powell went on to cite his foreign policy successes.
Woodward, in his new book, strikes a different note - and throws down the gauntlet to Powell far more directly than DeYoung ever does. In an interview with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., Woodward tells Levin, "I thought Powell was in anguish about what had happened in Iraq, with 130,000 troops still stuck there, facing an ever-growing insurgency.
"'I don't want to hear about his anguish,' Levin said, nearly exploding in anger. 'I don't have the stomach to hear his anguish. He is so smart and his instincts are so decent and good that I just can't accept his anguish. I expected more than anguish.'
"'What did you want?' I asked. 'An apology?'
"'Honesty. I wanted honesty. I don't want to read a year later or two years later that this is the worst moment of his life or something ... Powell had the potential to change the course here. He's the only one who had potential to.'
"'How could he have done that?' I asked.
"'If he had told the president that this is the wrong course,' Levin said. 'I don't think he ever realized what power lay in his hands, and that's an abdication. I think Powell has tremendous power' ...
"'When Bush asked Powell in January 2003 if he would be with him in the war, Levin said, Powell was at the peak of his influence.
"'Can you imagine what would have happened if he'd said, "I've got to give that a little thought"? Can you imagine the power of that one person to change the course? He had it.'"
DeYoung's book confirms what we already suspected about why Powell was not able to rise to the greatest challenge of his life. Like most good biographies, it leaves us with a feeling of inevitability. And in the case of Powell, a decent human being, that feeling is doubly bitter - for him, and for the country he wanted to serve but ultimately let down.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101506H.shtml
