The Soap Box

Really, where is Colin Powell? If there is anybody who can she some light on this entire Iraq War intelligence debacle, it’s him. And who would the country trust more to tell us whether the White House was up to no good?

Certainly Powell doesn’t have perfect information since he didn’t work in the White House. But he worked with all of the relevant players - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet - in the run-up to the war, reviewing the intelligence and crafting the justification for military action. He was never part of “the team” who engineered the hysteria that forced us into Iraq, those whom Powell’s former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson recently called a cabal and accused of hijacking the foreign policy prerogative of the Office of the President. But along with the limits on Powell’s access to privileged information comes heightened credibility on the issue; he’s not an inside man, so maybe he can tell us the truth.

Powell has never really been an inside man in the George W. Bush Administration. At the Republican National Convention in 2000, where Bush was nominated as the Republican presidential candidate, Powell delivered a supportive speech. But during that speech, he highlighted a number of issues which the GOP - and Bush himself - usually prefers to keep quiet on, such as the growing prison population, the links between race, poverty, and crime, the failure of our supply-side interdiction drug policy, the importance of universal child healthcare coverage, the failure of the GOP to understand the pervasive cynicism which the black community holds towards The American Dream and the party itself, and the double-standard of opposing affirmative action for women and people of color while tolerating corporate welfare.

As Secretary of State under Bush, Powell was the government’s most prominent doubter of the need to invade Iraq. His was the voice in the administration which cautioned patience, valued diplomacy, rejected the President’s cowboy approach to foreign policy, and insisted on acting only with the support of a grand coalition. The behind-the-scenes rift between the dovish Powell (irony of ironies) and the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal concerning the wisdom of starting a pre-emptive war was front-page news. But eventually, when Powell’s view did not win out, he fell into line behind his commander-in-cheif. Indeed, he was chosen to be the man to state the administration’s case for war to the world.

Sitting before the Security Council with his vial of white powder and satellite photos of Iraqi tractor trailors, Powell assured the world that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. But long before the revelations about Karl Rove and Scooter Libby’s involvement in outting Valerie Plame came to light, even before David Kay’s final report confirming that there were no weapons, going all the way back before the war to Powell’s speech in 2003, even then there was a significant number of people who suspected that the evidence had been tampered with. Powell himself appeared apprehensive while speaking the administration’s words, maybe knowing that there wasn’t quite enough “there” there to justify starting the country’s first pre-emptive war. Describing the experience recently, he said, “It was painful. It’s painful now.” Then and now. Not just now that he knows the intelligence was wrong, but also then, when he must have at least suspected it.

One might expect Powell to be bitter at the administration for hanging him out to dry. “It’s a blot,” he has said. “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 would be reasonable for him to be resentful of a President, a Vice-President, a Secretary of Defense, and a CIA director who fed him intelligence, virtually all of which was wrong, to present to the entire world. Before the speech, Powell spent five days with Tenet checking the reliability of that intelligence. His hard work was in vain, and his reputation has been tarnished.

And yet, despite the consequences he has suffered and the suspicions he must have harbored, his voice has hardly even been heard since stepping down as Secretary of State in January. In September, he gave an interview to Barbara Walters on 20/20, finally giving some glimpse into what he believes happened to him. His estimation? “There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.” The intelligence community. Not the Secretary of Defense, not the Vice-President, not the Director of the CIA, but their underlings. They were the ones who blew it, and caused the very heads of our government to give him bad information for the most important speech the world will see for decades to come.

Wilkerson has recently spoken out to tell the nation about the pressure put on the intelligence community by the White House and the Department of Defense to come up with the right intelligence to support their rationale for war, corroborating scores of similar accounts in the media from former intelligence personnel. If his chief of staff was aware of the administration’s behavior, how could Powell not be? How could Powell spend five days in a room with the Director of the CIA verifying intelligence and then not suspect the Director was looking the other way when all of it turned out to be erroneous? Even if an analyst was intentionally trying to get bad intelligence into Powell’s speech, how could it not have been discovered through even a modicum of oversight - never mind five days with the CIA Director - when many already believed it to be faulty?

After the dust had cleared, George Tenet was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, while Powell retired into self-imposed near-obscurity. For the time being, the man who lost the most as a result of the drive to war still chooses to cling to a rationalization that no intelligent person can take seriously, rather than speak truth to power. The lone administration voice who thought better of the invasion, who has borne the greatest punishment for its mistakes, who is in perhaps the best position to reveal the truth to the American public, and who alone the American people would be anxious to forgive if he would just come clean, continues to be loyal to his commander-in-chief.

Alas, he fingered the nameless, faceless analysts for the job because placing the blame on anyone more superior would eventually bleed its way back up to the President. Of course, no one has yet accounted for the fact that Powell may have been not just suspicious, but a willing participant in fooling the American people into war, and the absurd rationalization he clings to is not a rationalization at all, but a cover story; given his (oft-forgotten) history with the Iran-Contra Affair, the hypothesis is actually not that unlikely. Either way, perhaps one day - hopefully one day soon - Powell will finally decide, as many soldiers before him have had to do, that his duty to his country is greater than his duty to himself or to his commander.