No, its not a cut-paste, so excuse my ramblings…
I was quite disappointed by Colin Powell yesterday. Well to give the man some credit, he is at least consistent. But this consistency, which is normally a virtue, becomes a big liability when the person just becomes pig-headed and refuses to admit he was wrong. And just to lay the groundwork, I thought he was the best appointment made by Bush Jr, as he seemed like a man who had credibility, was upright and trust-worthy (well, as trust worthy as an American politician can be). Also, later on when the news started coming out that the Bush White house is a power struggle between Donald Duck/Cheney on one side and Powell on the other on the issue of what is a real threat to US… I, like many others, thought Powell is on the right track when he says Iraq is not an imminent threat, Al-Qaida is. However, for team-play’s sake, I assumed he did decide to go along and represent US in their onslaught against Iraq or maybe he was converted by the massive piles of “evidence” provided by the CIA or whoever.
Last year, with great fanfare the guy gave an audio-video presentation to the UNSC claiming exact sites of suspected WMD in Iraq. The presentation was remarkable on several fronts, and the impression one took away from that presentation was that as soon as American eagles land in Iraq and have a free reign, they will discover all these giant silos of biological and chemical weapons. There were skeptics, there were critics and there were believers.
Fast forward to today. The US team of WMD experts has now been called back from Iraq, and this is as good a sign as any that even the Bush Whitehouse in all seriousness does not expect any WMD in Iraq anymore. The gentlemanly thing is to stand up and say,“yeah, our intelligence agencies collected that info. We verified it as best as we could. That information has now proven to be false and exaggerated and hence we admit we may have made an over-estimate of Iraq’s WMD program”.
But no.
Secretary of State Colin Powell’s response has been to claim that he is “confident” of the claims that he presented to the U.N. Security Council last February. Powell says that his presentation represented the views of the intelligence community. “I was representing them,” he said. "It was information they had presented publicly, and they stand behind it.” “And this game is still unfolding” ?!?!
Give up dude. Why stain your reputation (if any is left) to go out on a limb and defend the indefensible?