Americans trust no one today as they trusted Colin Powell
WASHINGTON >> I guess I knew this day would come.
Twenty years after the first rumblings began on Pennsylvania Avenue about an Iraq invasion, news of Colin Powell’s death finally made me open the drawer where I keep a thick notebook filled with rationales for, and against, that war.
Like so many Americans, I was deeply torn about the second war in response to the 9/11 attacks that originated in Afghanistan. I studied hard. I interviewed dozens of people, listening to all sides of the discussion, especially to those opposing the war. One thick section of notebook contains a long dissertation on the morality of any war. Hundreds of other pages reflect the thinking of everyone from Tony Blair to Christopher Hitchens and scores of others from various disciplines and viewpoints.
I reread German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s works, and pored over his thoughts about nonviolence and pacifism when confronted with an unjust state. The Nazis changed his mind on that score. In one of history’s most famous transformations, Bonhoeffer became a vocal, antiNazi dissident and ultimately was arrested, imprisoned and executed by hanging.
I’m no Bonhoeffer, but I’m a realist when it comes to necessary war. Our attack on Afghanistan to destroy the Taliban and root out Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida seemed necessary to me. But in the case of Iraq, a temporary insanity (well, perhaps not so temporary) settled over our country and did not skip my house. I didn’t recognize the person in the mirror who seethed with a lust for revenge.
Unlike with Afghanistan, the reasons for invading Iraq were murky at best. Saddam Hussein hadn’t been part of the 9/11 attacks, but George W. Bush had made clear that countries that supported terrorism would also be on his target list. There was no smoking gun connecting Iraq and al-Qaida, and what connections existed seemed unconvincing.
Worrying, yes, but that is not the same as having conspired to destroy the United States.
The most compelling argument was that Hussein, who had gassed his own people, was developing weapons of mass destruction. It, too, was inconclusive. Both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Richard B. Cheney were firm on it, and few dared to doubt such seasoned government veterans.
Slowly, I was coming around. But the moment I convinced myself that invading Iraq was justified came on Feb. 5, 2003, when then-Secretary of State Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council.
“We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction; he’s determined to make more,” Powell said. “Given Saddam Hussein’s history of aggression, given what we know of his grandiose plans, given what we know of his terrorist associations, and given his determination to exact revenge on those who oppose him, should we take the risk that he will not someday use these weapons at a time and the place and in the manner of his choosing, at a time when the world is in a much weaker position to respond?”
After 9/11, “no” seemed to me a rational response.
Why take Powell’s words over all others? Because I trusted him above all others.
Powell was everything we admire in a human being: a military man of conscience, courage, honesty, erudition, loyalty and gentlemanly demeanor. In fact, in February 2003, he was the most trusted man in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center. If Powell said it, it had to be true. Americans of all shapes and stripes believed in Powell in a way that is impossible to imagine now.
Reporters quickly learn that you’re only as good as your sources. There were serious problems with the intelligence on which Powell relied. And some of that intelligence was stretched — and then some — to accommodate what had become a fevered Bush administration mission.
We trust no one today as we trusted Powell — and that is the saddest news of all.
I trusted Powell’s words above all others. That we have no one like that today is the worst news of all.