The Mysterious Gen. Powell

Most excellent post by Victor Davis Hanson on Colin Powell...

As I wrote earlier I remain baffled by Colin Powell, whom I have always liked and respected. But consider: he said that he was still a (a) conservative, but (b) voted for the most liberal candidate for the presidency since George McGovern. Fine….

(c) But he gave no policy reasons at all why Obama’s platform was more akin to his own than McCain’s. Why, then, the political change?

(d) Oh, he insisted his choice had nothing to do with racial fides or solidarity, but almost immediately following the election, offered a sermon on reaching out to minority groups; in the case of Obama’s majority win, however, 90% of the African-American community voted along racial lines, in a way whites did not for McCain. George Bush made more high-level minority appointments than did Bill Clinton. Sec. of State, National Security Advisor, Attorney General—these posts were all staffed in the Bush administration by African-Americans or Hispanics. George Bush gave far more in AIDs relief to black Africa than did Bill Clinton. On the diversity issue Bush vs Clinton is at best a draw for Clinton.

(e) He suggested that conservatives were insensitive to the needs of gays and minorities, but in 1993 Powell had led the military’s resistance to gays in the military as envisioned by the Clinton administration. (re: Powell’s worry over diversity: Sarah Palin was the first woman to be nominated as VP on a Republican ticket.)

(f) He offered Olympian instruction about morality and the need for conservatives to turn off Limbaugh and construct a new more diverse ethos, but testified (in vain) in court under oath about the sterling character of the now felonious Sen. Ted Stevens, a reprehensible politician of the old boy network if there ever were one. He criticized Sarah Palin as a sort of conservative dinosaur, but she took on the business as usual climate in Alaska (cf. again, Powell’s encomium concerning the Alaskan Stevens) as Powell did not in Washington. During the Kafkaesque Libby trial, at some point Powell must have known that his own trusted subordinate, Richard Armitage, had first disclosed the supposed CIA affiliations of Valerie Plame, and then remained unconscionably silent as Scooter Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice originating from a false charge that he had first disclosed Plame’s covert persona—that was, as we now know, never really covert.

(g) Powell advised ending the first Gulf War prematurely, ensuring both the survival of Saddam and the slaughtering of the Shiite uprising. His testimony before the UN about WMD in Iraq proved flawed, but flawed in my view also because he failed, as Sec. of State, to remind the world that the US Congress had voted for 23 writs for war, and that most of these casus belli were of prior interest to the UN and absolutely unimpeachable—ranging from Saddam’s genocide to violations of UN and 1991 armistice accords. The point here is merely that in the past his own decisions have been as difficult and controversial as those whom he now finds such easy fault in.

(h) Powell’s statements are inconsistent at best, nonsense at worst: he now deplores the right-wing of the Republican Party. Fine, but Ronald Reagan, its apotheosis, promoted him (his break came in 1987 when Reagan named him National Security Advisor in his late 40s). Given his emphasis on diversity and inclusiveness, he could have much more easily disparaged Reaganite conservatism on the same basis that he is now writing off the party of McCain. His ideal apparently was McCain centrism, which was far to the left of either his past two employers, Reagan or Bush I (compare the very tough anti-liberal and polarizing 1988 campaign). But now given the centrist McCain candidacy (comprehensive immigration reform, no to ANWR, yes to man-induced global warming, etc.) Powell suddenly for the first time in his career endorses a Democrat. (The time to do that would have been 1980, 1984, 1988 or 2000). It simply doesn’t compute; and when one figures in the timing of the endorsement (post-September 14 meltdown as the economy and McCain’s candidacy went southward), expediency looms large despite the pretext of principled criticism. Footnote on racial polarization: McCain went out of his way to forbid Rev. Wright campaign ads; Obama only disowned the Rev. after his National Press Club antics and after his prior infamous “I could no more disown…”, despite the substantial record of racial hatred shown by Wright against whites, Jews, Italian ethnics, etc.

All in all—simply stunning!