けがまけ。

Colin Powell is joins the ranks of the disenchanted.

"It's grave and deteriorating," Colin Powell said of the situation in Iraq on CBS News' "Face the Nation." "And as Secretary-designate of Defense Bob Gates said at his confirmation hearing, we're not winning. So if it's grave and deteriorating and we're not winning, we are losing…

"Over this summer, the United States and Iraqi forces launched Operation Forward Together," he said. "It began in June, and then phase two began in August with thousands of American troops going into Baghdad to try to stabilize the situation. They haven't stabilized the situation. So we have tried this surge of troops over the summer. I am not persuaded that another surge of troops into Baghdad for the purposes of suppressing this communitarian violence, this civil war, will work."

More importantly, Powell also calls the Army "just about broken."

``There really are no additional troops'' to send, Powell said… ``The current active Army is not large enough and the Marine Corps is not large enough for the kinds of missions they are being asked to perform.''

When Powell was at State, we all hoped that he would speak truth to power and would generally be impossible for Bush to ignore. It may be a bit late, but even now the White House still has to pretend to listen.

Press Secretary Tony Snow says Powell's comments were "pretty consistent" with what the Bush administration's saying. … But Snow won't say if the White House agrees with Powell that America's losing the fight. He says, "I'm not playing the game any more."

Tony Snow is far from the first press secretary not to play the game of talking about what's going on in the world. The fact that even Powell, the consummate soldier, is now trying to talk Bush down from the crazy tree is encouraging. There's a double moral here: the forces of self-destruction will always be able to take us farther down the road that's paved with good intentions than we'd like; but even the worst men of power eventually lose their control as completely as the best.

A final thought on Colin Powell: a few weeks ago, a friend of mine asked me what I thought of Condoleeza Rice. I replied, "well, she wouldn't be the first intelligent and capable black person to have a real shot at the presidency ruined by being too loyal to George W. Bush."