Powell Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
Why am I always the skunk at the garden party? It seems I have offended the most popular person in the world.
In a New Yorker interview with Harvard’s Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gen. Colin Powell says about Bosnia: “William Safire and Tony Lewis say this will only take a little bit of bombing and it will work. No historical precedent exists for such a position.”
Warming to his misleading diatribe (I have long suggested a whole lot of NATO bombing to protect the Bosnians, not a little), Powell went on to say: “And Safire drives me to distraction. Sometimes … he starts down this logic trail, and every time he gets trapped he just says, ‘Air power can do it.’ Forget it. The technology isn’t that good.”
That’s the straw-man trick: Take your opponent’s argument to a ridiculous extreme and then attack the extreme. My actual position was that we should arm the victims of aggression and support their defense of their homeland from the air. Of course ground troops are vital, but Muslim defenders, who greatly outnumber Serbs in Bosnia, lacked only weapons.
To my criticism of defeatist diplomats, Powell replied, “He’s getting increasingly arrogant in his old age.”
Wow. That’s some excoriation. Though my colleague chose to kiss the rod, it is my nature, when raked by suppressing fire, to welcome the engagement.
At 65, I am entitled to take on the geezer lobby about controlling Medicare costs, but do not feel the onset of decrepitude imputed by “in his old age.” Do I charge America’s best-selling author with making an ageist slur? On the contrary, I take it as an innocent idiom.
“Increasingly arrogant?” Moi? It’s true I tend not to salute public figures, in or out of uniform, and I have been needling our candidate-to-be about his foreign policy mistakes. Evidently my failure to join in the mass adulation has made the general testy; that same snappish force-divider used to afflict Bob Dole.
Let us set aside the hoo-ha about abortion and school prayer amendments, where libertarian Republicans like me welcome Powell’s positions. In that, a president can only exhort. Instead, consider foreign policy, where a president must act.
On stopping Saddam Hussein, author Powell asserts he was the lone voice around President Bush asking “if it was worth going to war to liberate Kuwait.” That misconstrued the crisis, which was about leading the world to stop aggression; moreover, Powell’s reported but unadmitted preference for continued economic sanctions would have led to disaster. We now know how close Saddam was to developing nuclear and germ-warfare weapons, which would have threatened U.S. troops if the counsels of delay had prevailed.
On allowing Saddam’s Republican Guard to escape because killing them did not look good on television, Powell remains in denial: Incredibly, he insists that destruction of the Guard “would not have made a bit of difference in Saddam’s future conduct.” No reviewer has dealt with this strategic absurdity.
On Bosnia, see the top of this column about this Army man’s contempt for NATO air power in supporting indigenous troops. The Weinbergerized Powell, again failing to see the principle of collective defense, recoiled at any less-than-popular action that might last longer than 100 hours. He considered the Serbs invincible without the commitment of hundreds of thousands of outside troops.
But look what happened when limited NATO air strikes - not even rising to Level III of attacking tanks, barracks and major bridges - destroyed Serbian command nodes, communications lines and prepositioned ammo dumps. Combined with well-armed Croatian advances and the attacks of Bosnian government troops, this air dominance demoralized and helped rout undisciplined Serbian troops that military experts long ago declared victors.
On the three big politico-military judgments of his career, ultra-cautious Colin Powell was wrong, wrong and wrong. No wonder he gets testy at such a reminder; chalk it up to the hubris of youth.
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