Colin Powell has demons; Don Rumsfeld does not
GQ has landed separate interviews with Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. There's little in them that we don't already know. Colin Powell is reflective and regretful: I didn't know [the intelligence] was flawed. Everybody was using it…. But the fact of the matter is that a good part of it was wrong, and I am sorry that it was wrong." Don ...
GQ has landed separate interviews with Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. There's little in them that we don't already know.
GQ has landed separate interviews with Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. There's little in them that we don't already know.
Colin Powell is reflective and regretful:
I didn't know [the intelligence] was flawed. Everybody was using it…. But the fact of the matter is that a good part of it was wrong, and I am sorry that it was wrong."
Don Rumsfeld is not:
I sleep fine…. You get up and do what you do. And when it's over, it's over…. You know? If you asked me when was the last time I looked back, I don't do much of it."
Rumsfeld believes America planned for the postwar in Iraq:
[B]efore the war, I sat and—this is on the record, all of this—I sat down and handwrote fifteen, twenty, twenty-five things that could be … could go wrong, could be real problems."
Powell does not:
Don had written a list of the worst things that could happen, but we didn’t do the contingency planning on what we would do about it."
Perhaps that's because Rumsfeld was too busy cautioning against an invasion. That's right, against going in to Iraq. "Were you one of the people driving the bus who wanted to invade Iraq?" GQ asks. Rumsfeld responds:
No."
That's unlikely to come as any consolation to Powell, who apparently sees Rumsfeld and other hawks as the biggest threat to America:
What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?
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