The Evil of Banality

Ambition mixed with submission leads to defeat.
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The Evil of Banality
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A new biography confirms that Colin Powell went along with the Iraq war because he was following orders. The tragic irony of the good soldier is that he deserted the people he was trying to protect.
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In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to convince the UN Security Council of Iraq's alleged WMD program. He was unsuccessful.
On Sept. 19. 2005, eight months after Colin Powell resigned as George W. Bush's secretary of state, he gave a speech to the National War College. Afterward, an audience member asked him to explain whether he really supported the Iraq war and whether he had ever considered resigning. Powell replied that he had proposed trying diplomacy before going to war, and that Bush had agreed to try. Yet he had always known, he said, that Bush might decide to invade Iraq later. When Bush did, Powell said, "I supported him. I can't go on a long patrol and then say 'never mind.'" Powell concluded by saying that no, he had "never thought of resigning."
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This story, which Karen DeYoung relates at the outset of "Soldier," her competent but constrained new biography of Powell, raises the crucial question that will forever hang over the career of America's most famous soldier: Why did he continue to give public support to a war that privately he had grave doubts about? In fact, the story also provides the answer.
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Powell's comparison of serving as secretary of state to going on a combat patrol says it all: He stayed on the Bush team because he was a loyal soldier, for whom resigning was not making a principled stand but deserting his post. Powell's decision cleared the way to a disastrous war, hideously bloody and apparently endless. The war, according to a new study from the Lancet, has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis so far, and the Army chief of staff has announced that he plans to keep the current level of U.S. troops in Iraq through 2010. But Powell seems incapable of grasping that he very likely could have stopped the war, and his biographer fails to sufficiently explore the issue.
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Powell's military mind-set was the main reason he supported the war, but it wasn't the only reason. As DeYoung, an editor at the Washington Post, reveals, he was also a profoundly cautious man, not particularly ideological and not given to dramatic gestures or making waves. "He had risen steadily through the military and four administrations by maintaining a careful balance between deliberate prudence and intrepid competence," DeYoung writes. Powell's pride, and his past successes, also played a role. She notes that Powell "had been winning bureaucratic battles for so many years that he simply refused to acknowledge the extent of the losses he had suffered. Beyond his soldier's sense of duty, he saw even the threat of resignation as an acknowledgment of defeat. He was a proud man, and he would never have let them see him sweat." But the low-key professionalism that served him well in his illustrious military career proved a fatal impediment when it came to standing up to the radical ideologues in the Bush administration -- or indeed in even recognizing what he was dealing with.
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,442222,00.html