Former secretary of state Colin Powell, who was instrumental in selling the disastrous Iraq War, is now claiming that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is in “shambles.”
Neo-con Colin Powell slammed the Republican Party and President Donald Trump during an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS”, laughably describing himself as a “moderate Republican” and claiming “The Republican Party has got to get a grip on itself.”
“Right now, Republican leaders and members of the Congress, in both the Senate and in the House, are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out. Will they lose a primary? I don’t know why that’s such a disaster, but will they lose a primary?”
“And so, they need to get a grip, and when they see things that are not right, they need to say something about it because our foreign policy is in shambles right now in my humble judgment,” Powell continued.
Colin Powell’s record while secretary of state was more of a shambles than anything we are currently dealing with. Powell has admitted his 2003 speech to the United Nations, where he sold the Bush administration’s rationale for war in Iraq, a “blot” on his record.
The shameful speech set out to detail Iraq’s weapons program, but as the intelligence would later confirm, that program was nonexistent.
More than 16 years later, the speech continues to haunt Powell and the administration — not just for what it got wrong, but for the unintended consequences it set in motion.
Powell laid the groundwork for ISIS
In one section Powell mentioned the name Abu Musab al-Zarqawi 21 times. The aim was to establish Zarqawi as the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The problem, according to former members of the intelligence community, is that although Zarqawi once travelled to Afghanistan hoping to meet Osama bin Laden, he was considered a poor recruit for Al Qaeda.
As PBS Frontline surmised:
Powell’s U.N. speech helped elevate Zarqawi’s status, and within months, he was rapidly gaining followers in Iraq, fomenting sectarian warfare and laying the groundwork for the organization that would become ISIS.