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| isolated freak | Posted
on 07-May-04 09:37 AM
Everyone's talking about this GQ feature on Powell. A great read. Casualty of War Four years into an embattled Bush administration, Colin Powell is hard at work at something he's never had to worry about before: salvaging his legacy. By Wil S. Hylton A few weeks ago, I went to see Colin Powell in his office. The room was tiny and the light dim. An Asian lamp on his desk cast a faint glow onto the walls, and the shades of his windows were drawn, giving the room a padded, womblike feel. Everything was in earth tones. When I commented on the warm ambience, Powell shrugged his considerable shoulders and said, "Yeah, because I have stuff lying all over the place." It was true. He was surrounded by a jumble of paperwork and clutter. The bookshelves behind his desk were jammed with old photographs and volumes of world history, some upright on the shelves, others crooked and diagonal, halfway to falling off. In one corner, a podium was pressed against a window, as if he had been practicing a speech to the drapes, while in another corner his suit jacket was slung over a cherry valet stand, hovering above the floor like a ghost. In place of the jacket, Powell wore a dark blue windbreaker with the words BOYS & GIRLS club on the breast. He sat behind his desk with a calm, curious look. I had come to see Powell because, for several weeks, his closest friends and colleagues had been telegraphing a story to me. Powell was finished, they'd said. Exhausted. Frustrated. Bitter. He was uncomfortable with the president's agenda and fatigued from his battles with the Pentagon. His reputation had been stained by his speech at the U.N. in February 2003, when he insisted that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and as the journalist Bob Woodward has noted in Plan of Attack, he was despondent about being cut out of the war plan in Iraq. In the months since those humiliations, as the body count mounted and the WMDs never appeared, his enthusiasm for the job had waned. His enthusiasm for the whole administration had waned. As his mentor from the National War College, Harlan Ullman, described it, "This is, in many ways, the most ideological administration Powell's ever had to work for. Not only is it very ideological, but they have a vision. And I think Powell is inherently uncomfortable with grand visions like that." Or as Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said of Powell's disastrous speech at the U.N. last year, "It's a source of great distress for the secretary." Or as Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, put it, "He's tired. Mentally and physically." None of Powell's friends had made any pretense of speculating about or guessing at his feelings. They spoke for him, openly and on the record. Some even went so far as to alert me when something they said was not coming from Powell or had not been expressed by him. And now, at the tail end of my reporting, I was going to hear from Powell himself. He had invited me in for a rare one-hour chat. Not to the formal sitting room, where he entertains state visitors—the room he calls "the funeral parlor"—but the dark, private cubbyhole where he actually spends his day. As I settled into my chair, I couldn't help wondering what he wanted to say. I knew from his staff that he had been briefed on my interviews with his friends and knew exactly what I had been told, in detail. But I also knew that however disenchanted and humiliated he may have felt, however severe his disillusionment and frustration, he was a soldier, unlikely to speak out against a sitting president or discuss his battles with the administration. It seemed unlikely he would even admit the urge to retire. So where, exactly, did that leave us? For more: http://us.gq.com/plus/content/?040429plco_01 |
| isolated freak | Posted
on 07-May-04 09:38 AM
WIL S. HYLTON IS A GQ WRITER-AT-LARGE. "Casualty of War," will be available in the June 2004 issue of GQ, on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles May 18, and nationwide May 25. |
| isolated freak | Posted
on 07-May-04 09:39 AM
aih.. read the title as GQ on Powell. |
| suva chintak | Posted
on 07-May-04 10:11 AM
IF bhai, That was a very insightful commentary on CP. My own feeling towards this man who has perhaps reached the highest position any black has arrived at in the US establishment is along similar lines. I thought he would be a great role model and a inspiration for the African-American dream in the US, I think he has miserably failed all, including himself. The blatant lie he gave at the UN as scientific proof with all the charts and satellite pictures was his biggest undoing. When he found out that he had been supplied with false information by the Pentagon, he should have resigned on moral grounds. I think his stature would risen immensely. But by chosing to stick to his chair when he knows he is an outside figure on real foreign policy issues (much less on the inner ruling circle of Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Ashcroft), he now looks like a pathetic Uncle Tom figure. He has absolutely no influence on how US foreign policy is conceived and implemented. So why stay on? Thus another promise came to an unnecessary disappointment. SC, the occasional IR pundit |
| isolated freak | Posted
on 07-May-04 10:36 AM
I agree SC dai. But, we have to udnerstand one thing: Powell is a military man and all his life he was trained to follow the orders of his superiors. So acording to this article, this loyallty and discipline could have barred him from resignining.. and I somehow believe in this. Bush ordered him to make the case for invasion and Powell had to do it, whether he wanted to or not. The article sugegsts that Powell actually was looking for a diplomatic solution to the Iraqi problem, and it was Rumsfield and his gang who opposed him. By the way, if you have time, please check out the Washington Post discussion forum on Rumsfield. Some great comments there. |