"Bush's night of the long knives"
The fall of Powell and the rise of Rice reveal the true face of this strange, Soviet administration, where bureaucratic fear and blind loyalty reign supreme.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/11/17/regime/index.htmlNov. 17, 2004 | Colin Powell's final scene as secretary of state was a poignant but harsh reenactment of his self-delusion and humiliation. The former general held in his head an idea of himself as sacrificing and disciplined. But the good soldier was dismissed at last by his commander in chief as a bad egg. President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld regarded him either as useful tool or vain obstructionist. They deployed his reputation as the most popular man in America and the most credible face of the United States for their own ends, and when he contributed an independent view he was isolated and undermined.
Powell has been a peripheral figure, even as a fig leaf, ever since his climactic moment before the United Nations Security Council, on which he staked his credibility, when he presented the case that weapons of mass destruction in Iraq required going to war, consisting of 26 falsehoods, and about which he later claimed he had been "deceived." When the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled, he offered the president the 17 volumes of his "Future of Iraq" project, but it was instantly rejected. Having predicted everything from the looting to the insurgency, and how they might be avoided, the "Future of Iraq" was politically incorrect.
Powell had wanted to stay on for six months of Bush's second term to help shepherd a new Middle East peace process, but the president insisted on his swift resignation. Immediately, Condoleezza Rice was named in his place. She had failed at every important task as national security advisor, pointedly neglecting terrorism before Sept. 11, enthusiastically parroting the false claim that Saddam had a nuclear weapons program (while suppressing contrary intelligence), mismanaging her part of postwar policy so completely that she had to cede it to a deputy, and eviscerating the Middle East "road map."
But Bush's performance princess was his favorite briefer; ever devoted, the unmarried Rice in an unguarded moment once called Bush "my husband." As incompetent as she was at her actual job, she was as agile at bureaucratic positioning. Early on she figured out how to align with the neoconservatives and to damage Powell. Her usurpation is a lesson to him in blind ambition and loyalty.
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