Читать книгу Blaming No One - Dan Inc. Whitman - Страница 9

April 7 of this year the Aspen Institute pulled together a remarkable feat, assembling three former Secretaries of State—Baker, Albright, and Powell—to reflect in the National Cathedral about the meeting point of personal conviction and national interest. Aspen’s president, Walter Isaacson, maybe the only person who could measure up to moderating such a thing, kept the dialogue at a brisk pace, admirably drawing out each former SecState in roughly equal amounts.

Imagine, personal values on the same playbill as national interest. And in a cathedral.

On one point Isaacson, invoking the absent Donald Rumsfeld, baited Powell: “Rumsfeld says you are wrong on this.” Toro, toro!

It seemed scripted: after less than a five-second delay, Powell said of the former SecDef, “Rumsfeld’s memoirs are something between deceptive and illusory.” Those were his exact words. Lots of people wrote them down.

Astonishment filled the expansive hall, and 2,000 listeners stirred, exclaimed, howled, laughed. A few started to applaud, but then stopped in mid-clap. This was, after all, the venue where George W. Bush declared war on September 14, 2001. Imams weren’t supposed to use mosques for this purpose, but cathedrals must be different.

On the April 7 incident, I know you might not believe this happened, since no news source reported it. But I assure you it did, and on the record. Powell finally got to say in public what had been on his mind for eight years. Maybe it was even pre-arranged with moderator Isaacson, who looked pretty pleased to have set off a sulfurous chain reaction.

Now skip to April 22, when the Associated Press got hold of an advance copy of UN Chief Nuclear Inspector Mohamed El Baradei’s new book, The Age of Deception. Nobel Peace Prize winner El Baradei picks out the period 2002-2003 as one of the “shame of a needless war.” During this period, of course, all the world knew the tensions between Rumsfeld and Powell, and their rivalry. Notwithstanding, the team pulled together and claimed or feigned threat of WMD from Iraq in February of 2003, and into the UN Security Council session of March 7, 2003, leading to UNSC Resolution 1441 on March 17. After false British intelligence had been cited ten weeks earlier in the January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, SecState Condoleeza Rice had aptly noted, “[Sheesh,] it was only thirteen words.” She kept the refrain going into March.

(One imagines other thirteen-word statements of levity, like, “I will tear your tongue from your head and roast your testicles good.”) Mohamed El Baradei knows from WMD, and now in 2011 calls for a criminal investigation of the whole team. You’re killing me, Mohamed, I’m pulling a stomach muscle from laughing.

In Seville, Spain, my friend was accosted by a shoeshine man wanting to polish her canvas running shoes. She said in her perfect Spanish, “Look. Someone here is an idiot. Either you or me.” In defense of the shoeshine man, it could have been possible that my friend might have been the idiot. In such a case, anything goes. As it does with our voters – note the conciliatory manner in which I say that, where reds and blues can each find truth in the same statement.

Back to Powell v. Rumsfeld, with the others comfortably not present: what if we were to accept the evidence we now have, that the whole team lied? Would anyone mind, and would the team unravel as the one pointed a finger at the other to cop a plea?

And when a man is killed in war, is he less dead if the “Laws of War” were scrupulously adhered to in the killing?

Stop, please! My laughter is half way to rictus, I could get an embolism if you keep on.