Colin Powell's questions about any new military plan for Iraq may sound obvious, but they've never been asked--honestly--by the Bush White House

"If somebody proposes that additional troops be sent, if I was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, my first question . . . is what mission is it these troops are supposed to accomplish? . . . Is it something that is really accomplishable? . . . Do we have enough troops to accomplish it?"
--former Secretary of State (and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman) Colin Powell, yesterday on Face the Nation"

The lead to Karen DeYoung's Washington Post account actually strikes me as more predictable and less interesting:

Former secretary of state Colin L. Powell said yesterday that the United States is losing what he described as a "civil war" in Iraq and that he is not persuaded that an increase in U.S. troops there would reverse the situation. Instead, he called for a new strategy that would relinquish responsibility for Iraqi security to the government in Baghdad sooner rather than later, with a U.S. drawdown to begin by the middle of next year.

I have no doubt that Powell was asking questions like those above, or trying to, during his rocky service inside the Bush administration. And much as I think he did both the country and himself a disservice by going along with what he must have known was a bogus policy, and for not resigning on principle when he understood that the administration was irrevocably committed to an invasion of Iraq without reference to any facts, at the same time I have to respect what must have been his conviction that it was his obligation to fight the fight from within to the best of his ability, even if he ended up losing both the fight and his reputation.

Still, in his reemergence from the shadows, he may have done the country another service. Every time Chimpy the Prez or one of his fellow stooges talks about "staying the course," or (now) "finishing the job," you want to grab hold of them and . . . well, fill in your own fantasy. What the f--- is the "job"? you want to scream into their itsy-bitsy brains.

Fugitives from the Bush administration like John Di Iulio and Paul O'Neill have described their horror at the discovery that in the decision-making process there was no process at all. So, obvious as the questions Secretary Powell proposed yesterday are, it's extremely useful to be reminded that decision-making, at least of the rational kind, truly is a process. When you do it the other way around--starting with deeply entrenched dogma and then trying to clothe it in policy--the results usually aren't so terrific, as witness the catastrophic mess we've made of Iraq.