Pride and pain.

These words resonated again after a recent Nashville Tennessean article on the mounting casualties in Iraq for the 101^st Airborne, headquartered in neighboring Clarksville.

As a veteran, I am filled with pride by living near the historic 101^st, and feel, if only tangentially, the pain suffered by the parents, spouses and children of those who, no doubt, performed admirably while serving their country.  The pain turns to rage because I believe one of our most revered military leaders was central to leading us into this quagmire-of-a-war in Iraq.

When a military hero falls, it hurts.  When that hero was one of the leaders I respected most in Washington, it hurts more.

That person is Colin Powell.

As the fury of the Bush campaign to wage an attack on Saddam Hussein intensified, I was buying none of it. On the fateful day when then-Secretary of State Powell stood before the United Nations and the world and gave a convincing plea about the dangers which lurked behind the dictator-shielded walls of Iraq, I began to soften my opinion.  For the first time, my resolve against the invasion was somewhat shaken.  Unlike the politic-laden babble of his bosses and colleagues, maybe, I thought, there might be something to their story.

The subsequently revealed fallacies of the intelligence that led Secretary Powell to talk about the “nuclear threat,” and the recent rush to express regret and anguish  by former Powell aides and by the General himself, has led me to a very sad conclusion: Never appoint a military man to a diplomatic post.

I have always taken comfort in the fact that most career military officers would go to any lengths to avoid combat.  They know personally and/or historically about the horrors of war and will go to great lengths to avoid committing troops to harm’s way.  That’s why I trusted the testimony of Secretary Powell, until the realization began to sink in that, as a member of the President’s cabinet, he was doing what a soldier was trained to do: Following orders.  He had to be a member of the team, or he had to resign.  Too bad for the U.S., and for thousands of American and allied troops and thousands of Iraqis that he didn’t choose to resign.  I don’t know how many rational-minded U.S. senators and congressmen had their votes swayed by Secretary Powell’s UN presentation, but I have to believe many were influenced by the words of the well-respected former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

I haven’t done exhaustive research, but I think history will show that most so-called military “hawks” never served in the military.  Of the “Team Iraqi War,” only Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld served on active duty (coincidentally, Secretary Rumsfeld served as a Navy  officer during the same peacetime years that I served as an enlisted man in the Air Force).  The other team leaders, President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney and political guru Carl Rove never served a minute of active duty.  These were the “hawks” that had us hell-bent on war at any cost.

Almost as criminal as the “Team’s” campaign was their apparent lack of cultural judgment once they proclaimed: “Mission accomplished.”  One of the most revealing stories that surfaced just after the fall of the famous Saddam statue in Baghdad was that the CIA had printed 100,000 small American flags for the Iraqis to wave as the troops triumphantly marched into their capital city.  Someone was lulled into thinking that we would be welcomed as liberators rather than as foreign invaders.   The flags were quickly whisked into mothball storage to await another “celebration.”

Then came the ill-fated search for weapons of mass destruction ( WMDs). They couldn’t find any, so our “Team” quit mentioning WMDs and linked Iraq to our country’s battle with terrorism.  No links to Al Qaeda were proven before the war, but there now exists a deadly link that kills dozens daily. We heard little from the muted Secretary of State during the chaotic aftermath of the invasion, as he dutifully manned his post until his president was re-elected.

Is the world better off without Saddam Hussein?  Of course.  But, there are other dictators in the world we would be better off without as well and yet, we don’t choose to invade every country where they exist.  Should we support our troops? Absolutely. They are simply trying to survive and make the best of a bad situation.  Our brave soldiers performed admirably in a war they were trained to fight, and they are performing remarkably well trying to enforce a ferocious police action which no one forecast or prepared to handle.  Nothing should lessen our pride in the 101^st Airborne, or the thousands of Tennessee national guardsmen or any of our brave U.S. military men and women, yet we cannot forget the pain.

I want and hope to believe that Colin Powell wasn’t a member of the core team that has led us down this path.  But, I am now convinced that by playing the “good soldier” at a critical point in history, he is just as guilty of these criminal actions as the rest of the Bush “Team.”

Bo Roberts is a Nashville marketing consultant and managing partner of Roberts Strategies.