No news columnist writing today is better than Dowd at getting straight to the essence, as she does in her Times column on Powell. Here is part:
"He could have been president. Excitement swirled around him when he published his memoir 'My American Journey' on the cusp of the ’96 race.
But like another son of immigrants, Mario Cuomo, Powell shrank from a run at the last minute. It always struck me that Cuomo and Powell seemed to overanalyze whether they were worthy, while the WASPy sons of privilege, like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, just assumed they were worthy, no matter how little they knew.
Back in 1995, I wrote a column about the needlepoint-pillow rules Powell laid out in his memoir. It is sad to read them now because he broke so many of them when he drove his tank off the cliff known as Iraq. Like Rule No. 7: 'You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.'
Rule No. 1 was: 'It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.'
But there will be no morning from here to eternity when the decision to invade Iraq will look better.
Powell even failed to follow the Powell doctrine, which shunned attenuated wars in which our national security interests were not at stake.
The Shakespearean tragedy of Powell is that he knew it was a rotten decision. And, unlike the draft dodgers in the Bush White House, he knew the real cost of war. He knew they weren’t playing with toy soldiers.
But Powell embodied the phrase “soldiering on.”
He did not resign in protest, which might have stiffened the spines of Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who all voted to authorize the war out of political expediency.
He let Dick Cheney goad him into making the phony case for war at the United Nations; Cheney mocked Powell, asking if he was afraid to jeopardize his soaring popularity ratings, treating him like a flower child. And somehow, Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.
The demonic Cheney and the war-loving neocons in his posse — the ones in the Pentagon were ridiculed by Powell as a “Gestapo office” — needed an unimpeachable frontman. Once they began leeching Powell’s integrity, there was no way that they weren’t going to drain him dry...."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/opinion/colin-powell-legacy.html
"He could have been president. Excitement swirled around him when he published his memoir 'My American Journey' on the cusp of the ’96 race.
But like another son of immigrants, Mario Cuomo, Powell shrank from a run at the last minute. It always struck me that Cuomo and Powell seemed to overanalyze whether they were worthy, while the WASPy sons of privilege, like George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, just assumed they were worthy, no matter how little they knew.
Back in 1995, I wrote a column about the needlepoint-pillow rules Powell laid out in his memoir. It is sad to read them now because he broke so many of them when he drove his tank off the cliff known as Iraq. Like Rule No. 7: 'You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours.'
Rule No. 1 was: 'It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.'
But there will be no morning from here to eternity when the decision to invade Iraq will look better.
Powell even failed to follow the Powell doctrine, which shunned attenuated wars in which our national security interests were not at stake.
The Shakespearean tragedy of Powell is that he knew it was a rotten decision. And, unlike the draft dodgers in the Bush White House, he knew the real cost of war. He knew they weren’t playing with toy soldiers.
But Powell embodied the phrase “soldiering on.”
He did not resign in protest, which might have stiffened the spines of Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who all voted to authorize the war out of political expediency.
He let Dick Cheney goad him into making the phony case for war at the United Nations; Cheney mocked Powell, asking if he was afraid to jeopardize his soaring popularity ratings, treating him like a flower child. And somehow, Powell naïvely thought that he and his pal George Tenet could scrub his speech of all the deceptions shoehorned in by Cheney’s co-conspirators.
The demonic Cheney and the war-loving neocons in his posse — the ones in the Pentagon were ridiculed by Powell as a “Gestapo office” — needed an unimpeachable frontman. Once they began leeching Powell’s integrity, there was no way that they weren’t going to drain him dry...."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/23/opinion/colin-powell-legacy.html
