The Powell Conundrum

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If you don't have 8 minutes to spare, the gist of the interview is that Rachel Maddow asks Colin Powell directly if a) he thinks waterboarding is torture and b) if waterboarding, among various other acts of "enhanced interrogation", were discussed in meetings that Powell attended (the answer, we now know, is yes). Powell dodges both questions, making the very strange argument that we don't know if it was torture, and he doesn't know if he was present for any conversations, but that the answers to these two riddles lie in whatever legal and presidential scholars eventually conclude from the transcripts of the meetings. In other words, he is not himself qualified to answer the question, and so he must respectfully not answer. I understand that he may feel personally responsible to the former president and the former cabinet to dodge the question entirely, but goddamn that's some weak tea. And, to me, it highlights one of the more confusing aspects of the inside story of the Bush Administration: how did Powell remain so popular in the public?

Powell has, since 1991, been a fairly well-liked guy, both in the press and amongst the throngs of Americans with only a passing interest in politics. A lot of his credit, throughout the 90s, was built on the premise that he was a highly non-ideological thinker, so much so that he refused to answer people when they asked what party he belonged to. In the run-up to the 1996 presidential election, Powell published an autobiography, a telling sign that he was at least toying with a run at the White House, and the response to even the rumours was overwhelmingly positive. He declined, a wise move considering the problems the Republican party was facing that year, and waited on the sidelines for four years until Bush appointed him Secretary of State.

Now here's what perplexes me: the Bush Administration, throughout 2002-3, exploited the hell out of Powell's pragmatic and even-handed reputation, dragging him out in front of the UN, for example, to point out how slam-dunky the whole invasion of Iraq was going to be. Even an absurdly generous interpretation of his tenure as Secretary of State, though, has to concede that he voluntarily made these announcements and gave these presentations. His participation on the side of invasion covered the whole debacle in a thick layer of serious, practical, non-ideological glitter, and that was precisely the point.

Fast-forward 6 years. The entirety of the Bush Administration is widely and deeply disliked by the American people. Except, of course, Colin Powell. When Powell came out last year, way too late in the election cycle to make any real difference, and said he would be voting for Obama, his announcement sucked up all the media oxygen for two days straight. Chris-Matthews-types all across the pundit universe interpreted this endorsement as a crippling blow to McCain's chances, the kind of thing that was perfectly timed to inflict maximum impact, just how a great general would do it. Of course, it was largely irrelevant short of keeping a couple days of good media coverage on Obama at a very late point in the game, but that's not what matters to me. I don't understand why, after everything he was involved with, Powell came out on top. He is the only Bushie to exit unscathed, and yet it was his contribution that was probably most essential in selling the war to the more skeptical parts of the American public. To use an analogy, when a toy is defective (full of lead, let's say), we blame the people who designed it, but we also reserve scorn for those who marketed and sold it, especially if they knew what they were involved in. To use another, we all have a special place in our hearts for Wall Street for all the toxic financial mechanisms it came up with in the last half-decade, but we also make room, justifiably, for media outlets like CNBC who provided the cover necessary for Wall Street to fuck up more and more. So why does Powell get to walk away scot-free?

Even W., Oliver Stone's Freudian dream sequence of a film, comes off easy on Powell, casting him as the cautious and skeptical dissenter among a cabinet of yes-men and violent psychopaths. At worst, the movie implies, Powell is guilty of not airing his grievances publicly, of being too much of a good soldier at a time when his "real" views would have been helpful. But isn't that just as bad as anything anyone else did? Doesn't the fact that his consent was understood by the White House as essential to getting their war on mean that he was, by giving this consent, just as responsible? The same is true with torture: he was there, to some extent, during the ongoing conversation the Bush administration was having over how best to get information from "enemy combatants". Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he did have serious concerns over what the White House was planning, his silence, for Cheney et al., was golden.