THE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.
“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”
Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.”
He added: “It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States.” All the military could do, Powell suggested, was put “a heavier lid on this pot of boiling sectarian stew”.
I’m trying to catch up and this one from the London Times really got me. I suppose that Colin Powell is the only member of the Bush Administration we really respected. His completely fallacious U.N. speech was a disappointment to all. I was working full time when he made that speech, so I only saw highlights on the news and in the paper. I was disappointed in the flimsiness of the evidence, but at the time naively assumed that what he said was, at least, the truth. I, like the rest of us, had hoped that he had enough integrity to fully vet what he was saying. And by report, he did refuse to include a lot of things that were written in by Scooter Libby, like the Niger Forgeries. But still, he did make a speech to the U.N. that was simply not true [as in a "lie"]. Now he tells us he tried to talk Bush out of the war.My first reaction was "Why didn’t you say this sooner?" – but I know the answer. He’s a good soldier, and a Republican. I guess he was grateful for the chance to serve, and loyal to his commander. I suppose there’s honor in that. Colin Powell was the highest ranking black American ever in our government. We don’t think about that part of it, but it’s an awesome responsibility. He knew what was right, but was in no position to act on what he knew. I guess I’m glad to know that he tried to talk to Bush about this war. There’s honor in that too. But frankly, the most honorable thing would be for him to join us now in trying to get this war stopped. He owes us that. 
He’s the one person among them we believed in, even those of us on the other side of the fence. He knew it was a mistake then. He knows a lot about how it happened, and he could open a few eyes with what he surely knows.
I see him as a tragic figure, but I guess in the end, I’m proud of him for having tried to talk to the boy king. I used to wonder if he would ever run for President – he seemed like Presidential material. I met an Army colleague and friend of his a few years back. He told me that Powell’s wife said flat out that he could not run for President. She felt that there’s still enough racism in America that he would be assasinated – and she wasn’t going to have that. I remember being confused that he became Secretary of State rather than Secretary of Defense. I now understand that as Bush and Cheney using his reputation, but not his expertise. It’s a shame. I’m pretty sure he would have never allowed Wolfowitz and Feith to operate as they did under Rumsfeld. And I expect he’d have run a better war [not that we needed this particular war, better or worse].
To me, Colin Powell is an important figure in American history. I find myself hoping that comments like the ones in this article are harbingers of more to come from him. And that seems to be the case. Here’s an interview from All Things Considered on NPR today. It’s worth a full read:
Over the past several weeks, former Secretary of State Colin Powell has spoken with increasing openness about the nature of the war in Iraq, about what went wrong, and about the limitations of the current strategy.
Some time ago, Powell apologized for presenting an inaccurate case to the United Nations on Iraqi weapons.
Powell does not support Congressional efforts to bring the troops home. But he tells Robert Siegel in an interview on Wednesday that troops will have to start coming home next year, because the military is stretched too thin.…Question: You’ve described a meeting in August 2002 with President Bush, two and a half hours where you outlined, as you saw them, the dangers of occupying an Arab country. On the other hand, when it was time to go to war in Iraq, you say you supported going to war. How do we get your role right? How do we best describe your position on the war?Powell: Well, you’ve just described it. My job was to make sure the president took into consideration all of the issues that would be involved in a conflict in Iraq, and at that meeting, I laid out to him the problems we would face. We would have broken a civil government, and suddenly, we’re not only the liberators, we’re the occupiers, and under international law, we become the government, and that’s going to be expensive, it’s going to take a lot of our troops for a long period of time, and it would be a political burden for a number of years.
The president listened carefully. He asked me to brief his chief of staff and some others the next day, which I did, and he asked me how [we should] deal with this. And I said, let’s take it to the United Nations — they are the offended party…. And I said, this may well mean that we change the nature of the regime so it is not a threat to us anymore, but we don’t actually change the regime. Saddam Hussein might still be there…
He’s still unable to directly criticize Bush and Cheney. But maybe he’ll wake up in the night some time soon and realize that the loyalty of a good soldier is to the State and its Citizens, not to its Administrators…
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