The Last Shred of Colin Powell’s Relevance Is Gone, Thank God | The American Spectator

No, this column is not asserting that Colin Powell, who stands as one of the worst mistakes of the Bush Republican era, has any relevance. Quite the contrary, but what I will argue here is that one of the chief benefits of President Trump’s successful airstrikes, which have done grievous damage to the Iranian nuclear program, if not particularly laying waste to the Iranian regime itself, is to make clear that Powell can be discarded once and for all.

Powell was a terrible Secretary of State for many reasons. The most flagrant of those being that he utterly, and consequentially, failed when assigned a critical task during George W. Bush’s signature presidential action, that being the invasion and conquest of Iraq in the years following the 9/11 attacks. (RELATED: Let’s Hope Trump’s ‘Spectacular Military Success’ Is Not Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’)

The war plans for that invasion called for a pincer movement; namely, that U.S. troops would penetrate Iraq from the south, invading from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but also from the north, coming from our NATO ally, Turkey. As Iraq had attacked both the Kuwaitis, briefly occupying and looting that country, and Saudi Arabia, it was easy to get the position from those two countries to stage from their territory. But the Turks were recalcitrant, and real negotiating skill was needed to bring them aboard.

Forget about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of the Iraq War for a moment. We’ll get to that subject shortly. The war was decided upon at a level above Powell’s pay grade — Bush made the decision to go, and Congress made the decision to authorize it and to pay for the Iraq adventure. As such, the war was then U.S. policy, and as the secretary of state, Powell was tasked with getting the Turks to allow the Fourth Infantry Division to open that second front.

He couldn’t do it. With the warehouse full of carrots and sticks available for those negotiations, Powell nonetheless failed.

Could he defend that failure with excuses? Yeah, sure. There are always excuses.

But because 4ID couldn’t go in from the north, there was no second front and while the initial invasion stage of Operation Iraqi Freedom was indeed a military marvel, what was lost was the ability to round up and neutralize elements of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime before they melted into the Sunni parts of Iraq in the northwest of the country.

Where they became the Iraqi resistance and, in large measure, ultimately, ISIS.

How many Americans were killed or maimed in the years that followed as our forces did what they could to pacify that country? It’s a number too grievous to mention even all these years later. Powell’s failure to open that second front through negotiations with the Turks still stands as one of the most famous diplomatic bloopers of this century. (RELATED: The Unintended Consequences of War)

None of that is particularly relevant today, but Powell is also famous for something else with respect to the Iraq War. It’s this quote…

You need to understand, if you take out a government, take out a regime, guess who becomes the government and regime and is responsible for the country? You are. So if you break it, you own it.

This became known as Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule,” and it’s utter and total nonsense.

It was actually allowed to become American foreign policy doctrine during the Bush years, and an utter disaster followed. Trillions of dollars spent, thousands of lives lost, untold amounts of national prestige set ablaze. And for what? (RELATED: The Mission Is Never Accomplished)

For Colin Powell’s fear of being blamed? That certain people predisposed to hate America might hate America?

What stupidity.

Powell was praised for having “broken barriers” in attaining the heights within the U.S. government that he attained, but of course, he was a mere careerist and certainly not a loyal soldier for the conservative movement that he hamstrung.

And the funny thing was that Powell was against the Iraq War that he went to the U.N. and shilled for… badly, as it turned out, because the argument he used to sell that war was Iraq’s supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, which never ended up being found.

The rumors persisted for years that much of Iraq’s WMD stash was evacuated to Syria. If that was true, it sure would have been nice to have 4ID closing in from Turkey to intercept that haul, no?

This might all seem like old news. But I rehash it to establish that the strategic incompetence which underlay the Iraq War, which in itself was an example of strategic incompetence, was bombed away at Isfahan, Natanz, and Fordo two weeks ago.

Here I should give credit to Ace of Spades’ Buck Throckmorton, who on Monday did yeoman work describing the sea change the airstrikes on Iran represented…

Our political class has repeatedly told us that the only allowable “solutions” to pressing problems are alternatives not embraced by the majority of Americans. That is why we finally turned to Donald Trump. Just one example was the border crisis — Democrats argued for mass amnesty and a wide-open border, while establishment Republicans countered by also proposing mass amnesty with a slightly less porous border. Trump laughed in all their faces, shut the border, and started deporting criminal aliens.

In the matter of foreign military engagement, we have also been presented just two bad options over the past few decades.

1) Massive military commitment to foreign wars, including nation building and boots on the ground in perpetuity, all with an endless airlift of fallen troops being flown home to Dover AFB.

2) Pacifism, with the U.S. never unleashing its military might, even where it is appropriate.

There is another much better option, which President Trump just demonstrated — the use of our military to destroy what needs destroying, and then leaving the mess as a lesson. If Iran attempts to rebuild its nuclear program in coming years, we can bust it all up again. We don’t have to occupy Iran or pretend that it will become a western democracy. It can figure out whatever it wants to become, but if Iran restarts its nuclear program or exports terror again, it can also face our wrath again.

Powell’s Pottery Barn rule was a misapplication of U.S. post-World War II history, in which it was somehow America’s moral duty to rebuild other conquered nations as Germany and Japan had been rebuilt. No such duty ever existed, of course — we rebuilt Germany and Japan so that the USSR wouldn’t do it and then repurpose them as even more powerful enemies within the Soviet sphere of influence.

In other words, because it was in our interest to rebuild them.

That was never operable in the case of Iraq. Nor of Afghanistan.

It’s worth conducting a thought experiment: what if we had gone into Afghanistan, laid waste to all the Al Qaeda and Taliban enemies we could find in 12 months in a purely punitive expedition, and then left?

The Pottery Barners would shriek that this would merely leave Afghanistan back under the Taliban’s control once we left.

And? This is different from our current reality, how?

Oh, of course. The trillions of dollars in military and “humanitarian” spending would still be in our national possession.

Iraq was far more a war of choice, of course. We didn’t have to go in. In retrospect, a better argument than the WMD shell game Powell played at Turtle Bay was that the Iraqis had defeated the U.N. sanctions regime imposed after the first Gulf War, and they had to be punished for having done so.

But that’s the argument of a globalist, not someone looking out for American interests. At the end of the day, whether the Iraqis were rearming themselves for another pointless war against their neighbors or their own citizens never made a whit of difference to our national security.

Once we finally saw where our interests actually lay.

The Iranian regime wasn’t reformed by our bombing of those three nuclear sites. They haven’t been chastened. The country’s top ayatollah issued a fatwa — a religious hit-man contract — against President Trump over the weekend.

And a foreign policy calculation not burdened by stupidities like the Pottery Barn rule might well consider such an offense to be fresh ground for new airstrikes. I’d rather not see those, but on the other hand, you can’t put a call out to terrorists, many of whom are quite likely embedded on our own soil, thanks to Joe Biden’s wide-open border for the previous four years, to kill our duly elected president without some notable consequences. (RELATED: From Tehran to Texas)

The point is that, shorn of Powell’s idiotic rule, we can consider these issues in an adult manner, and we can deal with our national security problems without feeling the obligation to bankrupt our public fisc with fresh forever wars. And therefore the understandable gnashing of teeth by the Tucker Carlsons of the world — Carlson’s freak-out over Iran was driven in no small part by a conviction that it would be the deep state/military industrial complex’s insistence on the Pottery Barn rule that would turn Iran into another Iraq — can be put to bed.

For now.

Powell has been gone for three years. I don’t wish to exhume him for further denigration. In fact, I hope we don’t have to exhume him at all. And it’s worth giving Trump thanks for making this the new state of play.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Five Quick Things: The Coming State of Being

The Fourth Era Comes to the Big Rotten Apple

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