The Powell Doctrine has left the building

"Our senior officers knew the war was going badly. Yet they bowed to groupthink pressure and kept up pretenses. ...Many of my generation, the career captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels seasoned in that war, vowed that when our turn came to call the shots, we would not quietly acquiesce in halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand."

That was Colin Powell, writing in his memoirs, on how he felt as a young officer watching U.S. actions in Vietnam collapse into a war of body counts and self-deception.

Mark Danner was reminded of those words as he pondered Powell's legacy following his departure from the Bush administration, particularly his failure to get Bush to adopt his doctrine of clear objectives, overwhelming force, and identified exit-strategy. Instead, Bush chose the Rumsfeld doctrine which goes something like, rapid strike, ignore forces in your rear as you rush towards the enemy's headquarters, followed by an attitude of "whatever; we'll see how things shake out on the ground."

What might "many of his generation" - who are indeed the men now commanding in Iraq - have said, had they not themselves quietly acquiesced?

They might have said that it is a deeply uncontroversial fact that the United States has from the beginning had too few troops in Iraq: too few to secure the capital or effectively monitor the borders or even police the handful of miles of the Baghdad airport road; too few to secure the arms dumps that litter the country; and too few to mount an offensive in one city without leaving others vulnerable.

Colin Powell's "quiet acquiescence" to a disaster that was waiting to happen, plain as day, will be his unfortunate legacy, I'm afraid.