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  1. #1
    keep asking questions George Gervin's Afro's Avatar
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    Colin Powell's New Book: War With Iraq Never Debated
    Posted: 05/09/2012 3:23 pm Updated: 05/10/2012 12:22 am


    2003. WASHINGTON -- In his new book, former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides what may be the most authoritative confirmation yet that there was never a considered debate in the George W. Bush White House about whether going to war in Iraq was really a good idea.

    In a chapter discussing what he calls his “infamous” February 2003 speech to the United Nations where he authoritatively presented what was later exposed as gross misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Powell notes that by that time, war “was approaching.”

    “By then, the President did not think war could be avoided,” Powell writes. “He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met -- and never would meet -- to discuss the decision.”

    The National Security Council, which was at the time led by Condoleezza Rice, is the president’s foremost advisory body for national security and foreign policy.

    The book, “It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership,” which will be released May 22, is largely a series of leadership parables from Powell, who now spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit. The Huffington Post obtained an advance copy.

    Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, "Decision Points," that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn't wanna use force,” he said.

    But Powell supports the increasingly well-do ented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point -- or decision-making process -- during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks.


    Former CIA Director George Tenet made an admission similar to Powell’s in his own 2007 memoir. "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he wrote. Nor "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

    Indeed, history shows that Bush had long wanted to strike out at Saddam Hussein and was trying to link Iraq to 9/11 within a day of the terrorist attacks.

    The first concrete evidence was the Downing Street Memos first published in 2005, which do ented the conclusions of British officials after high-level talks in Washington in July 2002 that “[m]ilitary action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

    An analysis of the historical record by the National Security Archives in 2010 concluded that, “In contrast to an extensive record of planning for actual military operations, there is no record that President George W. Bush ever made a considered decision for war. All of the numerous White House and Pentagon meetings concerned moving the project forward, not whether a march into conflict was a proper course for the United States and its allies. Deliberations were instrumental to furthering the war project, not considerations of the basic course.”

    The war, which President Barack Obama officially brought to an end Dec. 31, cost the U.S. government around $3 trilllion, left 4,487 U.S. servicemembers dead and killed more than 100,000 Iraqis. The Pentagon counts 32,226 U.S. servicemembers wounded, but the toll, including ulative psychological and physiological damage, may be as high as half a million.

    In Powell’s explanation of how he came to provide the misleading and inaccurate account of Iraq’s WMD capability at the UN, the former secretary of state points an incriminating finger at Vice President Cheney’s office -- confirming previous reports such as the one by Karen DeYoung, in her Powell biography.

    In the new book, Powell describes his reaction to the initial “WMD case” from the White House. “It was a disaster. It was incoherent,” he writes. “I learned later that Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, had authored the unusable presentation, not the NSC staff. And several years after that, I learned from Dr. Rice that the idea of using Libby had come from the Vice President, who had persuaded the President to have Libby, a lawyer, write the ‘case’ as a lawyer's brief and not as an intelligence assessment.”

    Powell gives himself credit for rejecting continued appeals from Cheney to add “assertions that had been rejected months earlier to links between Iraq and 9/11 and other terrorist acts.”

    All in all, Powell acknowledges that the speech was “one of my most momentous failures, the one with the widest-ranging impact.” But he also concludes that “every senior U.S. official would have made the exact same case,”

    He adds: “I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying -- of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.”

    The lesson of all this, Powell writes, is to follow these guidelines: “Always try to get over failure quickly. Learn from it. Study how you contributed to it. If you are responsible for it, own up to it.”

    But Powell didn’t exactly own up to this for years. His former chief of staff, Col. Larry Wilkerson, first went public in 2005 with details of a secret cabal led by the vice president which hijacked U.S. foreign policy and hoodwinked the president. Wilkerson also argued for years that there was never a formal decision to go to war. Powell con uously failed to back him up at the time.

    So what does Wilkerson make of Powell’s conclusory lessons? “Powell’s rules are for everyone else,” he told HuffPost on Wednesday.


    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1503592.html

    Yet the GOP Congress was silent.. now we have a GOP Congress outraged that 1 Border patrol Agent was killed and now they have opened a full investigation... Solyndra? Oh the horror.. GOP Congress is outraged.. yet totally silent when 5000 Americans died...

  2. #2
    Veteran
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    the Iraq invasion was decided by PNAC+MIC before dubya took office.

    http://www.projectcensored.org/top-s...come-to-light/

    Robert Sheer wrote that Johnson not taking down Nixon/Repugs for sabotaging the Paris peace talks showed the Repugs that the Dems would let them get away with anything.

    eg: Repugs sabotaging Carter's Iranian Embassy hostage negotiations so release would occur when St Ronnie The Diseased took office.
    Last edited by boutons_deux; 05-11-2012 at 04:39 AM.

  3. #3
    Cleveland Rocks CavsSuperFan's Avatar
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    Perhaps the greatest office manager to ever wear four stars...

  4. #4
    Orange Whip? Orange Whip? Viva Las Espuelas's Avatar
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    Screw Powell. If he felt there wasn't enough evidence or if he wasn't kosher with it then he should've put his foot down until he was satisfied. Now he's crying about it and pointing fingers all while making a buck. him cry me a river

  5. #5
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    Screw Powell. If he felt there wasn't enough evidence or if he wasn't kosher with it then he should've put his foot down until he was satisfied. Now he's crying about it and pointing fingers all while making a buck. him cry me a river
    What if it's in intentional phrase to get democrats to buy his book? What does that chapter come to?
    Last edited by Wild Cobra; 05-10-2012 at 03:31 PM.

  6. #6
    Alleged Michigander ChumpDumper's Avatar
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    I didn't know the Secretary of State outranked the POTUS.

    SpursTalk posters teach me new things every day.

  7. #7
    Orange Whip? Orange Whip? Viva Las Espuelas's Avatar
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    What is it's in intentional phrase to get democrats to buy his book? What does that chapter come to?
    Huh?

  8. #8
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
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    I thought that 9/11 gave us the reason to go to Iraq?

    Man I'm confused.

  9. #9
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
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  10. #10
    Veteran Wild Cobra's Avatar
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    "Is" should have been "if."

  11. #11
    i hunt fenced animals clambake's Avatar
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    powell told us years ago that the evidence used to justify the war was deliberately misleading.

    why shouldn't it be in the book?

  12. #12
    The Boognish FuzzyLumpkins's Avatar
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    Screw Powell. If he felt there wasn't enough evidence or if he wasn't kosher with it then he should've put his foot down until he was satisfied. Now he's crying about it and pointing fingers all while making a buck. him cry me a river
    The Bush Administration took his good faith and made him the fool. He doesn't need to point fingers. That's all been public knowledge for a long time.

    Powell resigned.

    How about you.

  13. #13
    Rising above the Fray spursncowboys's Avatar
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    Powell resigned because Bush took Cheney and Rumsfeld's side on everything. I agree that powell feels like he got screwed in all the faulty intel. But I think Bush. like all the democrats and bill clinton, made decisions in good faith.

  14. #14
    Rising above the Fray spursncowboys's Avatar
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    Plus no one ever gets fired. They always "resign"

  15. #15
    Rising above the Fray spursncowboys's Avatar
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    Condi Rice did a better job anyways

  16. #16
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    Unless Powell was living in some kind of FAUX News mind-warp he had to know that Cheney was leading the CIA/NSA into war against Saddam with phoney evidence....his shame, our loss...

  17. #17
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    On the other hand, he is the only former member of the Bush administration to admit that we were duped into war with Iraq....a war crime...

  18. #18
    Rising above the Fray spursncowboys's Avatar
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    Can you define duped

  19. #19
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    duped = curveball

  20. #20
    W4A1 143 43CK? Nbadan's Avatar
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    Cheney and all his appointed cronies in the State dept along with the CIA and Tenet where suppressing evidence that Saddam was not connected to Al Queda or 9/11 nor that Saddam any longer possessed chemical weapons and were practically sponsoring anyone who would say that Saddam was an imminent threat...

  21. #21
    Orange Whip? Orange Whip? Viva Las Espuelas's Avatar
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    The Bush Administration took his good faith and made him the fool. He doesn't need to point fingers. That's all been public knowledge for a long time.

    Powell resigned.
    So he couldn't simply resign in protest of the evidence that was gathered? You don't think that would've made everyone make sure that the evidence was solid? It sure would've made the media question the administration. I mean the guy looked like the cab was outside with the meter running, double parked during his presentation. If you're told by your employer or anybody to do somehing that your not comfortable with are you going to do it because they told you??

  22. #22
    Orange Whip? Orange Whip? Viva Las Espuelas's Avatar
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    "Is" should have been "if."
    Huh?

  23. #23
    The Boognish FuzzyLumpkins's Avatar
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    So he couldn't simply resign in protest of the evidence that was gathered? You don't think that would've made everyone make sure that the evidence was solid? It sure would've made the media question the administration. I mean the guy looked like the cab was outside with the meter running, double parked during his presentation. If you're told by your employer or anybody to do somehing that your not comfortable with are you going to do it because they told you??
    Someone is not familiar with the military or the notion of chain of command whatsoever.

    It was POTUS and his VP that were directing him not some middle management scab.

  24. #24
    Damns (Given): 0 Blake's Avatar
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    Cheney and all his appointed cronies in the State dept along with the CIA and Tenet where suppressing evidence that Saddam was not connected to Al Queda or 9/11 nor that Saddam any longer possessed chemical weapons and were practically sponsoring anyone who would say that Saddam was an imminent threat...
    So you can come up with this type of theory for the war in Iraq but not one for 9/11

    I don't get it

  25. #25
    Hey Bruce... Lebron is the Rock Sec24Row7's Avatar
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    Colin Powell wasn't elected president... the President decides whether there is even a conversation with him about what his policy/decision is going to be.

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