Colin Powell and Loyalty

Colin Powell's resignation yesterday as Secretary of State has produced an expected tsunami of blather. Much is made of his early "opposition" to the Iraq war and his loosing struggle to influence Bush foreign policy. In almost the same breath, we also hear about what a loyal team-player Powell is, always accompanied by comments about Powell's long military career where such loyalty is required.

The last thing the US needs is more government officials who are loyal to a President. When large decisions are made, and going to war is such a large decision, moral and ethical values should be much more important than loyalty to a President. Loyalty to what is right and what is right for the larger America and the world is loyalty we should applaud.

We still have one former Secretary of Defense running around the world writing books and giving speeches that include the lines that he could not speak out about a war he knew to be wrong out of loyalty to a President. That war cost over 55,000 American lives and probably a million or more Vietnamese lives.

Is Colin Powell the next Robert McNamara? Are we going to hear in some overblown biography in ten years that Powell opposed the war, knew it was the wrong thing to do, but he couldn't speak out because of "loyalty"? We need government officials who believe they have a duty to the larger public and will take action when they believe fundamental government policies are wrong.