I wasn’t paying attention to this when it happened, but here’s another career diplomat who has resigned her position in the State Department to protest Bush’s foreign policy. Mary A. Wright’s letter of resignation was sent to Colin Powell on March 19.

The idealist in me decided a long time ago that I would never vote for a Republican. But I confess that the realist in me, looking around at the political landscape and wondering where, oh where, are we going to find someone capable of steering us out of the current catastrophe, keeps coming back to one name: Colin Powell. Yes, I know he’s tainted by association with a lot of things that left-leaning folks in general and me in particular have a really hard time with: his military service in Vietnam, his role as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the first Gulf War, his flirtation with the Republican presidential candidacy, and, especially, his willingness to fall into line with the chickenhawks in the current administration after the so-called “diplomatic effort” failed.

But I continue to have this weirdly favorable attitude toward him. It dates to that “first we’re going to cut it off, then we’re going to kill it” briefing he gave during Gulf War I. My God, I thought at the time, here’s someone who is actually willing to tell the truth about what’s going to happen.

At first, my liking him was probably mostly a case of my projecting noble impulses and values onto the largely blank image he’d been careful to craft around his public self. But as time has passed, and I’ve made a point of trying to piece together more of what’s going on there, I’ve found my favorable opinion surviving largely intact. I don’t know why, but I’ve been willing to cut him a lot of slack, to interpret his participation in the Bush presidency as the waging of a long, drawn-out campaign for a more-sensible foreign policy than the one Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz have been pushing. He thinks like a soldier, whose duty is to follow the orders of his commanding officer, even while he’s doing his best to give that commanding officer the information and advice he needs to make good decisions.

But there comes a time when a person of principle has to stop following bad orders, and live up to a higher duty. I think that’s what the recent resignations coming out of the State Department have been saying.

I think Colin Powell should follow their lead. He should resign as Secretary of State, and run for president as an independent in 2004. If he did, I might very well confound my own ultra-liberal leanings and vote for him. I can’t justify it intellectually, really, but I continue to trust him.

Anyway, whether or not I would vote for him is beside the point. The point is this: If he followed this scenario and ran for president, I think he would actually win.

This entry was posted by jbc on Tuesday, March 25th, 2003 at 11:06 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.