"Is the political objective we seek to achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all other nonviolent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analyzed? How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?"
Faced with the war in Iraq, how might Mr. Powell have answered these questions? The main "political objective" the United States sought in Iraq, insofar as the president identified it, was to deprive Saddam Hussein of his weapons of mass destruction. These always ghostly objects have long since evaporated; and no matter how often administration officials repeat that the French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations also judged that Mr. Hussein had weapons, this will not change the recalcitrant fact that these parties did not accept that they posed enough of a threat to support an immediate war.
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Begun as an ideological crusade, the war has now settled into something bloody, murderous and crude, with no "exit strategy" in sight. The war's beginning, built on the threat of weapons that did not exist, and its ending, which flickered to life so temptingly on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Lincoln 18 months ago, have disappeared, leaving American troops fighting and dying in a kind of lost, existential desert of the present. We may not have yet reached Colin Powell's vision of "half-hearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand." But we are well on the way.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/opinion/21danner.html?pagewanted=2&oref=login
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