by BINOY KAMPMARK
“[Following this presentation], the US attacked the sovereign state Iraq… and turned this country into a constantly smoldering hotbed of instability in the Middle East. And chemical weapons were never found,” Kots highlighted. PHOTO/TEXT/Signs of the Times
When the compromised speak of judgment, the voice of credibility vanishes. In its place, a certain niggling sense of hypocrisy and weakness prevails. Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell is one of those of those compromised voices. He presided over a redundant State Department before the pressures of the Pentagon and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, keen to initiate an invasion of Iraq. He oversaw the bankruptcy of the Republican ideal before the nibbling sharks of neoconservatism within the administration of President George W. Bush. But that has not prevented him from being cavalier in assessing the legacy of Donald Trump.
In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on Sunday, Powell came across with an account pickled by the language of patriotic management and boastfulness. “I was a Republican who was Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor. I was a Republican who worked for George Herbert Walker Bush, and worked for George W. Bush. I’m a moderate Republican who believes that we should have strong foreign policy, strong defence policy, that we have to look out for our people, and we ought to work hard making sure we’re one country and one team.”
He took issue with the reticence and gingerly approach adopted by the Republicans to the president, who “are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out.” They needed to “get a grip, and when they see things that are not right they need to say something about it, because our foreign policy is in shambles right now in my humble judgment.”
Those are the words from a man who clumsily added several paving stones on the road to war against Iraq in the United Nations on February 5, 2003. If a shambles was what was needed in US foreign policy, Powell was going to do his bit. His address was an effort to furnish delegates “with additional information… about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq’s involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of resolution 1411 and other earlier resolutions.” The picture drawn by Powell was of an Iraq hostile and prevaricating, intent on overwhelming weapons inspectors with “useless information about Iraq’s permitted weapons so that we would not have time to pursue Iraq’s prohibited weapons.”
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