Problems with Powell

Faced with a US administration so brazenly hawkish, so dismissive of the demands and desires of other nations, so simplistic in its worldview, and so clearly right-wing, many Americans have come to see Colin Powell as the last man of reason, moderation, and integrity in our executive branch. Some have gone so far as to refer to him as the "dove" in the Bush cabinet. His moderate stance on affirmative action as well as his ability to put six or seven convincing sentences together without a problem has won him widespread praise. For sure, patriots may take solace in the fact that though our President stumbles over the word "nuclear" while threatening to preemptively unleash the world's largest arsenal of such weapons, at least Secretary of State Colin Powell is competent. He is someone we can trust, someone we must respect. This widespread feeling about Powell's honor, integrity, honesty, and credibility however _ and it often nothing more than a feeling _ must be questioned. Examining Powell and his bold claims, one quickly finds that both in terms of his historical role within the US government and military, and with respect to his current "enough is enough" presentation at the UN Security Council, there are many reasons both to reject his arguments for preemptively attacking Iraq, as well as to dispose of the idea that his is the "no-nonsense" voice in the Bush administration.

Judging from the way TV commentators swallow Powell's allegations about Iraq, it would seem like many have forgotten that Colin is the same man who, prior to Gulf War I, fed the public the lie (or as he later recanted after the deployment of US forces to the Gulf, the "error") that the Pentagon had received satellite photos of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers massing on the Saudi border. Such secret intelligence was cited by Powell and others to "prove" to the American people that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was bent on regional (if not global) domination, and so to get them to support a war to reinstall the US-friendly dictator of Kuwait.

Similarly, the media seldom note the fact that Colin Powell was involved in covering up the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, before that story got leaked nationally. And while we're talking Vietnam, it would seem like our media has completely forgotten how prior to the escalation of that conflict (which would kill two to three million Vietnamese), the President of the United States, with the help of US intelligence, explicitly and knowingly lied to us and the world about what came to be known as the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Falsely claiming that a US ship on a peaceful mission had, without provocation, been attacked in international waters by North Vietnamese forces, President Lyndon Johnson quickly pushed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through Congress, thereby gaining unlimited economic and military support for undeclared wars in Southeast Asia, which would last another decade.

In short, from the start, there is good reason to question the secret intelligence that Powell cites, both because he has a history of "erring" in such a way as to support US war-plans, as well as because the military executives in the US government have a long history of lying to whip up popular support for policies they've decided to pursue for their own reasons.

None of the above of course takes away from the fact that Powell gave a powerful performance at the UN Security Council. Who could but shudder as he talked about the thousands of deadly "teaspoons" of anthrax that inspectors had yet to account for? Who wasn't disturbed by the State Department-produced "Al-Qaeda family tree," which posited a link between arch-enemies secular Saddam and Islamic Wahhab Bin Laden? Granted this is a "link" about which US, British, and European intelligence experts are widely skeptical, but it's still scary to see on TV. As The New York Times quotes a German senior intelligence official who has long been studying al-Zarqawi, the man whom Powell cited as the Al-Qaeda-Hussein link: he has yet seen "no indication of a direct link between Zarqawi and Baghdad." Nonetheless Powell posits the link, supporting it with a flurry of circumstantial details that wouldn't be enough to convict a jay-walker, and yet, when combined with Powell's persuasive power, may be all the evidence necessary to justify firing a thousand cruise missiles into Baghdad, a city the size of Los Angeles.

Despite his image as a thoughtful and open-to-peace-kind-of- guy, it has become increasingly clear that Powell is utterly cynical towards UN inspections in Iraq. Yet even as he is dismissive of everything Blix wants to do and which Blix believes can be done in Iraq without war, Powell, like a proper performer aware that the regular folks at home are not so dismissive of the UN as he is, makes strategic references to Blix's statement in his own UN pitch. Powell thus characterizes his remarks as "support[ing] the core assessments made by Dr. Blix and Dr. El-Baradei." For, "as Dr. Blix reported to this council on January 27, 'Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it [emphasis added].'" Powell proceeds to state that Iraq has done "nothing" to conform to the requirements of the Security Council, and that _ as his interpretation of satellite photography proves _ further inspections are pointless. Saddam is just too sneaky.

But the "core" of Hans Blix's actual statement (and don't take my word for it, go read it yourself, as well as Powell's text _ both are available online at www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq and compare) actually argues something substantially different and subtler than Powell's simple all-or-nothing condemnation suggests. Blix, for instance, with regards to the success of inspections, states that between 1991 and 1998 _ when the US Inspector Richard Butler ordered the inspectors out of Iraq _ inspections "brought about considerable disarmament results." As he continued, "It has been recognized that more weapons of arms destruction were destroyed under this resolution than were destroyed during the Gulf War: large quantities of chemical weapons were destroyed under United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) supervision before 1994." Though he states that questions remain unresolved with respect to biological weapons, Blix writes that, "it is certain that UNSCOM destroyed large biological weapons production facilities in 1996." Moreover, "The large nuclear infrastructure was destroyed and the fissionable material was removed from Iraq by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)." Thus, the "failure" and the pointlessness of inspections would not seem to be nearly so complete as Powell cynically pretends. No wonder Blix and many other inspectors are calling not for war but for more inspections and more time to do them.

Powell's either/or, all-or-nothing language obscures the fact that arms inspections are a process, which as Blix states in his UN address, is not predicated on complete and instant openness and trust on either side, but which rather aims at producing increasing levels of trust and cooperation between inspector and inspected over time. This already seems to be happening in Iraq.

Concerning Iraq's cooperation to date, Blix told the UN _ well before the major positive developments of the last few days _ that "It would appear from our experience so far that Iraq has decided in principle to provide cooperation on process, notably access [to suspected weapons sites]." Blix is of course, not without criticisms for Iraq's reluctance to comply with various inspector requirements, nor should he be. But the point I wish to make here, before closing, is that Powell's overarching argument _ "Iraq has done nothing but deceive" and therefore we must do much more than just inspect _ rests on a terrible oversimplification of the process of inspections. More importantly, Powell's misrepresentation of Blix' statement is clearly aimed at painting a picture where war is the only option available to disarm what he describes as an essentially deceiving and duplicitous Iraq.

In short, because Powell's case for war has clear problems (namely little evidence of a credible Iraqi threat to the US or its allies), he drives the need for war home with misleading rhetoric. But though he performs the role of "reasonable leader" better than Bush does, his happy-to-bomb bad faith in selectively making use of Blix is unmistakable. Furthermore when it comes to the crucial issue of the "link" he conveniently posits between Al-Qaeda and Baath Party Iraq, his past lies and fabrications, as well as the skepticism of intelligence experts, undercut the basis for blind faith.

We cannot afford to sit back and "trust" Colin Powell. As Americans, we need to realize that the habit of viewing this man as a beacon of honesty, wisdom, or integrity within an otherwise corrupt Bush administration, whatever its reason, lays us open to justifications for mass murder that are founded on misinformation and manipulative misinterpretations of evidence, courtesy of the US State Department.

Joseph Ramsey is a graduate student studying English.