Iron said:
Back on track?! A botched war and inherited economic housing bubble. Hardly an ideological crisis. The truth is that the GOP has had a crisis of identity since the USSR collapsed and they kinda lost their national security edge. September 11 gave it back long enough to ensure reelection, but I dont think global terrorism has stuck the same way.
That's true, but there's another aspect to the GOP that seemed to emerge concurrently, or as a consequence; suspicion of intelligence and knowledge.
And Powell was so maverick that he compromised all his integrity by feeding the UN that shameful, sexed up presentation on Iraq's WMDs, let alone failing to persuade Bush against invasion, or even ensuring that the invasion force was of sufficient size and strategy
Well, Powell
is a Republican. Just because I think he's a moderate one doesn't mean I think he's right; he's still a Republican, and in general I disagree with their principles. But the gap between my views and Powell's is something I can reconcile - similar to how I could theoretically reconcile voting for the Liberals if ALP pissed me off too much (e.g. this new Internet censorship bullshit).
But to be fair, he did spend a lot of effort
trying to convince Bush not to invade. And he has admitted his UN speech was based on falty data and was a low point in his career.
And if we're talking strategy, McCain didn't even believe there was a possibility of sectarian conflict between Shi'ia and Sunni, so I think that trumps undercalculations in troop deployment levels (even though Powell
was the engineer behind the concept of overwhelming force and unanimous international support and cooperation to begin with, based on his Vietnam experience).
