I was not going to bother to post about the Powell and Adelman endorsements, but feared I might risk my blogger’s union card without the obligatory post.

As usual, I am the last at the Donk to get around to it. I felt I had no choice but to declare a “Yossarian” and paraphrase Joseph Heller’s famous protagonist from Catch 22 - “What if everyone was blogging about the Powell endorsement?” I can only respond as did Bomber Pilot John Yossarian: “Then I’d be a damn fool not to”.

The topic was not all that interesting, because I don’t believe that either Powell or Adelman’s endorsement will have any meaningful impact on this election. Obama will be elected for exactly one reason - the country is in the grip of a financial system meltdown and market panic during the last two months of the election. A poorly run McCain campaign did not help, but economic fear swamps all other considerations. Under this cloud the electorate will sweep the incumbent party out and the opposition party in. If McCain had kept it close, these endorsements might have made a difference and been important for Obama. As it is, the endorsements are bringing “coals to Newcastle”.

Unfortunately,as a consequence Obama and the Democrats will claim a mandate, have no meaningful opposition in Washington, and we are on board a high speed, hell bound train to the inevitable bad governance, corruption and abuse of power that always accompanies single party rule.

Back to Adelman. Obama supporters have breathlessly covered his endorsement as a shocking validation of everything that is wrong with the McCain campaign. After all, this is a “loyal lifelong Conservative Republican.”

I have a couple of problems with that characterization. First, it is astonishing that anyone who thinks the Iraq war was a mistake (as do I) would put any credence in Adelman’s judgment or take anything he says seriously. Adelman is most famous (infamous?) for his 2002 Washington Post editorial where he pitched the Iraq War as a “cakewalk”:

Adelman was a neocon’s neocon. And the neocon “might makes right” eagerness to wield the military as a instrument of policy rather than as a last resort, in conjunction with their willingness to sacrifice the Constitution, rule of law, bill of rights, and common decency on the altar of “security”‘ is IMHO the very reason why the Republican Party is on the verge of being rendered completely irrelevant.

As regards his professed “loyalty” to the Republican Party or conservative principles, recall that in a 2006 Vanity Fair article, Adelman was only too eager to hold himself and the neocon philosophy blameless, while throwing everyone else in the Bush administration under the bus. It stands out as one of the most gratuitous examples of craven CYA finger pointing ever committed to print. But hey! This is one of the key architects of the philosophy that may have destroyed the Republican party, and/or rendered it politically impotent for a generation. So why not pay attention to him and his endorsement for Obama? Neocons for Obama!

Colin Powell is a more interesting study…

Powell has been a frequent topic of posts on my blog. He is a man I deeply respected in the Bush41 administration, and would have whole heartedly supported for President in 2000. If we had used the Powell Doctrine as a guiding principle in 2003 as we did in the first Gulf War, we never would have gone down the disastrous neocon path in Iraq.

But the big questions about Colin Powell remains - Why did he enable the Bush administration to support a policy he knew to be in direct contradiction to the doctrine that bears his name? Why did he choose loyalty to the administration over loyalty to the American people? I asked this question before, in an open letter and a 2006 post where I wondered “whether Colin Powell might, in the judgment of history, carry the label of being to Iraq what McNamara was to Vietnam”:

Make no mistake. It was a critical decision point, a nexus in history, when in 2002 Colin Powell walked into the Oval office to advise the President. As he related to Tim Russert:

If Powell understood that this was the wrong path, Powell should have told Bush that he did not support the policy and resigned. Colin Powell enabled George W Bush to make the decision to prosecute the occupation. Colin Powell sold the war to the American people. Excepting Cheney and Bush himself, Powell is the man most responsible for the war decision.

At some level Powell knows this. He is a study in contradictions. As a consequence of failing to act on what he knew to be right in 2002, he has spent years explaining and justifying his actions. I cannot help but feel that this endorsement is yet another attempt to assuage his conscience, rehabilitate his reputation and wash the blood off his hands.

^{x-posted from “Divided We Stand United We Fall“}