Colin Powell

Secretary of State

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Powell dumps diplomacy for disco (CNN)

GQ report: Colin Powell wants out (PRNewswire)

Woodward: Bush barely consulted his top advisors about invading Iraq; Powell was mostly out of the loop; Rice comes across as incompetent (Newsweek)

Powell says new data may have affected war decision (Washington Post)

UAVs - part of the flawed argument for war in Iraq (Washington Post)



Fred Kaplan explains in Slate why Colin Powell and George Tenet are not bashing Clarke.

11/15/04
TWO STEPS BACK: While the Bush administration received a boost with the resignation of John Ashcroft, the resignation of Colin Powell as Secretary of State, while expected, is a loss for the country. He was the lone voice of reason on the "Dream Team" foreign policy team that ended up creating the mess in Iraq. Unfortunately, Bush rarely took Powell's advice, instead relying on hardliners like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Bush and the hardliners consistently undercut Powell's efforts at diplomacy. Bush also leveraged Powell's reputation in the world to help sell the Iraq war, only to have that reputation damaged when the world learned that the WMD claims were unfounded. Powell should have resigned then. Instead he plodded on as the loyal soldier, further diminishing his hard-earned reputation. Now he's being replaced by Condoleezza Rice - one of the worst National Security Advisors in our nation's history. At State she'll merely be a rubber stamp for the hardliners, and she'll force all the "moderates" in that department to fall in line as the Bush administration tries to stifle all internal dissent. It's hard to believe, but this second Bush administration might be worse than the first one.











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