The Poop on Powell

The WashPost spilled the beans on Christmas Eve about some of what led up to Secretary of State Colin Powell's resignation. You're forgiven if you missed it (as did we, up to our expanding butts in gift wrap at the time), but here are the salient points:

Ten days after winning reelection, El Presidente made the strategic blunder of asking Colin Powell his opinion on the security situation in Iraq. It was an understandable blunder, since Colin had been former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and knows a thing or two about conducting military operations in Iraq. But Powell has not shared, apparently, El Presidente's enthusiasm for this particular war, and when asked, he told Bush there aren't enough troops in Iraq to secure the ground and to establish a safe context for a free, fair, and legitimate election next month. Evidently, Bush didn't like Colin's opinion. Powell submitted his letter of resignation on the same day he made the comments ... Nov. 12th, according to the article in the WashPost. He made his resignation public three days later on November 15th.

Then less than three weeks later, in what looks like a minor concession to Powell's honesty, El Presidente announced he was sending 12,000 more troops to Iraq ... a pittance, granted, but also a tacit admission of weakness.

The pig-headedness of this president -- his manifest inability to admit a mistake -- is going to make for interesting revelations for many years to come.