"At a certain point, I've just concluded that for me
personally it is important to go ahead and affirm that
I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."

PRESIDENT Barack OBAMA, in an interview with ABC News. (May 9, 2012)

He becomes the first sitting president to support same sex marriage.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post is providing a preview of a new book, , It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, by Colin Powell that asserts that going to war in Iraq was never really debated in the Bush White House and that it was a foregone conclusion.  Here is an excerpt:

“In his new book, former Secretary of State Colin Powell provides what may be the most authoritative confirmation yet that there was never a considered debate in the George W. Bush White House about whether going to war in Iraq was really a good idea.

In a chapter discussing what he calls his “infamous” February 2003 speech to the United Nations where he authoritatively presented what was later exposed as gross misinformation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Powell notes that by that time, war “was approaching.”

“By then, the President did not think war could be avoided,” Powell writes. “He had crossed the line in his own mind, even though the NSC [National Security Council] had never met — and never would meet — to discuss the decision…”

Bush insisted in his own 2010 memoir, “Decision Points,” that the invasion was something he came to support only reluctantly and after a long period of reflection. During his book tour, he even cast himself as “a dissenting voice” in the run-up to war. “I didn’t wanna use force,” he said.

But Powell supports the increasingly well-documented conclusion that there was actually no decision-making point — or decision-making process — during the events between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks.

The preview concludes:

The lesson of all this, Powell writes, is: “Always try to get over failure quickly. Learn from it. Study how you contributed to it. If you are responsible for it, own up to it.”

But Powell didn’t exactly own up to this for years. His former chief of staff, Col. Larry Wilkerson, first went public in 2005 with details of a secret cabal led by the vice president which hijacked U.S. foreign policy and hoodwinked the president. Wilkerson also argued for years that there was never a formal decision to go to war. Powell conspicuously failed to back him up at the time. “

Hundreds of thousands of people killed and a trillion dollars of war debt and there was no serious decision making.  God help us!

Tony