Ep. 5322 – Ray McGovern on Colin Powell and Mike Pompeo – 7/31/2020

Ray McGovern joins the show to talk about Colin Powell and Mike Pompeo: two credentialed, respected members of the foreign policy establishment that have both been hugely damaging to American interests. McGovern first responds to the claim that Powell unwaveringly and heroically stood against the Bush administration’s desire to invade Iraq, succumbing only at the last minute due to new, more persuasive intelligence and the pressures of being overwhelmingly outnumbered. In reality, says McGovern, Powell not only should have known the whole time that Saddam Hussein didn’t have weapons of mass destruction—even after the final intelligence report, which was doubted at the time by his closest associates—but also didn’t ever resist the idea of the invasion very hard, being pretty much willing at the time to go along with Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the other neocons in the administration. Only more recently has he tried to depict himself as the man many Americans wanted him to be: a principled iconoclast who only relented in his steadfastness at the very last moment. In the current administration, Mike Pompeo presents dangers of a different kind in the form of a fervid quest to gin up hostilities between the U.S. and China. McGovern reminds us how disastrous the consequences of that war could be, and how much both countries benefit by a peaceful, cooperative relationship.

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