Endorsement of Obama shocks “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5033" conservatives
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4950
by Andrew Redmond
Colin Powell, the black affirmative action careerist whose color raised him to high level office in both the military and government, has stunned other Republicans, who once embraced the idea of Powell running for President himself, by following the lead of top “black conservatives” and endorsing Barack Obama. Less starstruck or naive observers are unsurprised.
Rush http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5619, Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia,” Limbaugh whined after Powell said he was worried about what Supreme Court appointments a President John McCain might make. “I guess he also regrets Reagan and Bush making him a four-star [general and secretary of state and appointing his son to head the FCC. Yes, let’s hear it for transformational figures.” (Powell has called Obama a “transformational figure”).
Limbaugh’s wing of the “conservative movement” long ago embraced the concept of a “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5678," GOP leaders are smugly looking forward to the base falling into line yet again.
Racial unity is a theme that has not only separated many leading “black conservatives” from their own white conservative sponsors, but also heavily damaged the Democratic special interest coalition, pitting blacks against women. The black/white woman divide has persisted in liberalism since the Civil War, when http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3756 knifing Clinton and switching to the Obama camp after being lambasted by other blacks as a “race traitor.”
Colin Powell owes the best parts of his career to conservative affirmative action largesse. He was made National Security Advisor to the Ronald Reagan White House in 1987, rising in 1989 to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George HW Bush, the highest ranking military office in the United States. He gained international stardom in the 1991 Desert Storm ouster of the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Perhaps panderingly, he was credited with the strategy called the “Powell Doctine,” which consisted of merciless aerial bombardment and refusal to engage enemy forces on the ground. The “Powell Doctrine,” calculated to skirt domestic opposition by minimizing US casualties, became the standard for America’s foreign adventures, particularly in the Yugoslav wars. According to some analysts, the “Powell Doctrine” led to US overconfidence and the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles.
While Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama is mainly racially based, he also is paying back George W. Bush for another betrayal that made Powell look like a liar and stooge before the world. Bush, Jr. appointed Powell the 65th United States Secretary of State, making him fourth in line to the Presidency and a position Powell held from 2001 to 2005. As the initial face of the “War on Terror” in the aftermath of 9/11, Powell was forced to tout the White House’s neoconservative party line. One example was his response to reports of the 2002 Jenin Massacre, when Israel slaughtered Palestinians in a refugee camp. As is sometimes the case, the US position Powell was forced to defend was even more extreme than that of the Israelis themselves. At the same time that Israel’s Shimon Peres was using the word “massacre” in relation to the event, which the Israeli army was also saying had resulted in large numbers of Palestinian deaths, Powell was obliged to tell Congress that “I’ve seen no evidence that would suggest a massacre took place.”
Much worse for Powell’s pride was his Stepin Fetchit role as the face of the neocon case for the invasion of Iraq. Before 9/11 Powell praised the brutal sanctions policy which had led to the preventable deaths of untold numbers of Iraqi civilians, claiming the policy had prevented Saddam Hussein from acquiring “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMDs). However, as the face of US foreign policy, Powell was forced to abandon not only his long-held opposition to the overthrowing of Saddam, having predicted the chaos that now engulfs Iraq, but also tout the neocon line that Saddam was in possession of WMDs after all. The neocon point was to manipulate the wave of revulsion, fear and patriotism ignited by the 9/11 attacks to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a goal which the neocons, opposed by Powell and patriotic elements inside the administration and various agencies, had advocated long before 9/11. “I tried to avoid this war,” Powell has admitted. “I took him [Bush through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”
Powell, ironically, may have been the most ethical of all the top Bush regime officials. He attempted to blunt the neocon offensive by insisting on an “international response” along the lines of 1991’s Desert Storm, a concession which slowed the immediate rush to war and which prevented the neocons achieving the unilateral US attack they had hoped to see.
A second concession Powell wrung from Bush was his demand that the case for an invasion be presented to the United Nations, another part of an effort to weaken the neoconservative unipolar vision of America as the world’s sole superpower, interfering globally (though mainly in the Mideast on behalf of Israel) in the guise of dispensing “democracy.”
Bush’s agreement to Powell’s UN demand led directly to Powell’s humiliation, which he apparently feels was engineered by his necon opponents. On February 5, 2003, Powell appeared before a special session of the United Nations Security Council, where he presented what he called “evidence” for military action against Saddam Hussein, centered on his new opinion, contradicting his 2001 stance, that Saddam Hussein was indeed in posession of WMDs after all. “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more,” Powell said. In its 2004 report, the Iraq Survey Group, a multinational task force formed to locate Iraq’s supposed WMD arsenal, admitted that no such weapons had been found, and that Powell’s 2003 UN statements had been based on phony “intelligence” and contained false information, some of which Powell himself was unsure of.
The fact that he had essentially been forced to lie to justify a US invasion on bogus grounds infuriated Powell, who later reported on Vice President Dick Cheney’s lack of concern for the accuracy of what Powell was being made to say: “You’ve got high poll ratings; you can afford to lose a few points.” Anger over the events led to Powell taking a more militant stance against his hardline opponents in the White House, particularly Cheney’s powerful office and Donald Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. The last straw came in September, 2004, at the height of Bush’s re-election campaign, when Powell openly admitted that his UN WMD presentation, which was the whole justification for the US invasion of Iraq, had been largely “wrong.” He also made public demands about the reorganization of US intelligence services. Such open flouting of the Bush party line led to his forced resignation within weeks and his replacement by Condoleezza Rice. (Rice, who is also black, has since made disloyal remarks favoring Obama). Powell now says that the situation in Iraq, which he helped, albeit with some reluctance, to engineer, is unwinnable. “It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States,” he says.
Earlier in his career, Powell was embraced with the kind of overenthusiasm many whites reserve for blacks they see as non-threatening and with the potential to reinforce patent myths about racial harmony. In 1996 he was seriously considered to be a GOP contender against Clinton, but finally declined, and was courted as a for executive appointment by successive federal governments. His politics certainly reflect the post-ideological, technocratic climate of Washington and of political leaderships across the Western world: despite being called a “conservative,” he is pro-abortion, favors affirmative action, supports gun control and played a leading role in Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on armed forces homosexuals.
Just as John Lewis abandoned his close white ally Hillary Clinton in favor of his racial kinsman Barack Obama, so too Powell’s betrayal strikes deep within the GOP’s leadership. Powell has donated generously to John McCain’s campaign, and was even a frontrunner in speculation about who McCain would choose as his Vice Presidential nominee, part of the politically correct algebra to weaken Barack Obama’s “postracial” appeal. Ultimately, of course, McCain decided to throw a bone to white workers and rural people, as well as women (among them Hillary’s PUMAs) by selecting Governor Sarah Palin.
To have someone at as high a level as Colin Powell so decisively betray McCain should be a “gotcha moment” for ruling elites about the real condition of race in America, but teaches a lesson that won’t be learned because of the ideological bankruptcy, and venality, of those who rule us. From the beginning of his campaign, McCain has gone whole hog to attempt to attract the support of blacks and other nonwhites, from http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4105" campaign. Meanwhile his policies seem almost calculated to alienate his long suffering white base. But just as Colin Powell has stiffed McCain and other “conservatives” for another black man, McCain has no hope of garnering more than a handful of nonwhite votes. As usual, while whites are “led” by corrupt hacks who deny that white racial interests even exist, nonwhites have a much more clear picture of what is at stake, and grasp the chance to speak as one voice.