Kill The Messenger
In the beginning of the year, when Colin Powell went to the UN to present the case for invading Iraq, I remember thinking several things. The first, how can government officials from various Security Council member nations look at identical intelligence briefings and come up with wildly different conclusions? The fact that this intelligence seems so open to interpretation in and of itself calls it's usefulness as a justification for war into question. Then, I thought, if the US has better info that they're letting on, what possible reason could they have for sitting on it? And lastly, as a tuned in briefly to what Powell was actually saying, I thought "God, isn't he using evidence that was gathered from Iraq ten years ago, before the first batch of UN inspectors went in?"

Well, now it sounds like the Pentagon (i.e. Don Rumsfeld) pushed him to use even shakier intelligence to support the case for war. The fact that Powell merely laments this after the fact brings me back to that whole Harry Belafonte debate from last fall. If you believe in certain things, how can you be a willing participant in the propagation of lies that will cost American and Iraqi lives? Personally, the fact that Powell is Secretary of State matters less to me as time goes on and he demonstrates the content of his character through his association with Bush.

"Role model"? Don't make me laugh.