Happy Loss Of Colin Powell's Honor Day

It's Super Tuesday, but it's also an ignominious milestone, the date where Colin Powell traded his own dignity for the clucking approval of the very serious foreign policy neoconservancy. The date where he held up a tiny vial of anthrax and showed a bunch of shadowy aerial photographs and mixed them up into a big stew of deception and misinformation. The date where all the serious people shook their heads and said "Well, if Colin Powell's on board, then it must be true. The date, in many ways, when those who desire global hegemony, endless empire, hijacked our government for good.

At the time that Powell was at the UN, five years ago today, Iraqi scientists knew that there were no WMD, no nuclear weapons, no programs that could even hope to threaten the United States.

When Saad Tawfiq watched Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations on February 5 2003 he shed bitter tears as he realised he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing.

As one of Saddam Hussein's most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in 1995 -- and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was the then US secretary of state -- Tawfiq's television was able to received international news through a link pirated from Saddam's spies next door -- waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

"When I saw Colin Powell I started crying. Immediately. I knew I had tried and lost," Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital Amman [...]

"I went crazy. The questions were dumb. She was telling me: 'They know you have a programme,' and I was saying: 'There is nothing. Tell them there is nothing, absolutely nothing. They have left us with nothing'," Tawfiq said.

"She was taking notes. There were 20 major questions, and to all of them the answer was: 'No, no, no...' I kept swearing on the grave of my mother."

According to Tawfiq, Saddam Hussein gave the order to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes in 1995, after his brother-in-law and arms chief Hussein Kamel defected and briefed the UN inspectors.

"I was Saddam's scientist," Tawfiq declared, with an ironic smile. "In 1991 if you exposed something you were killed. In 1995 if you hid something you were killed!"

Now, five years later, we're caught in very difficult foreign policy messes on two fronts, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rationale for these wars, to fight Al Qaeda and radical extremism, has completely failed, as Al Qaeda seeks WMD and remains as great a threat to the country as at any time since 2001.

We have just utter incompetence at the highest levels of our foreign policy, and a concerted effort to cover up those mistakes. But Colin Powell's error was out in broad daylight, for everyone to see and regret. It was a day that drove a stake through the heart of this country.