The Bush administration's cause for an Iraqi war has unraveled since Dr. David Kay's pronouncement that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and probably never were. What Kay tried to do, however, was disconnect that fact from Bush and blame it on an intelligence failure. By an intelligence failure he was not referring to the president's personal intelligence, but that of his agencies.

In his effort to disconnect Bush politically from this muddled situation and find a fall guy who was expendable, he argued an intelligence failure, and that is the CIA. It seems as if everyone nowadays is trying to find cover--from the Bush White House on down. So last week, the CIA Director vigorously defended his agency and the intelligence it gave the president.

Director Tenet stated definitively that the CIA never said that Iraq posed a threat to this nation. Nor did they say they knew that Iraq had WMD's. But the Bush Administration (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, and Powell) argued that there were such weapons and America knew where they were.

It was Colin Powell who, as a good soldier to his own political death, went before the world at the UN and vainly argued that Saddam posed a serious threat to the US because Iraq and Saddam, a mad man we say, have WMD's. Using diagrams and charts, intelligence information from the US and Britain, Powell tried to show that we knew where those weapons were. And only a number of Americans saw what Powell showed us as a threat to this nation; the world, however, was not at all convinced and said no to a US invasion.

Now everyone, including Colin Powell, the perpetual good soldier and point man to the world for this country, is trying to backtrack from his missteps and still to be in unison with administration officials on invading Iraq.

Last week, a Washington Post reporter asked Secretary Powell whether he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq if he had known there were no WMD's. His answer was evasive but he did say: "I don't know. An absence of a stockpile changes the calculus. It changes the answer you get." Sounds like backtracking to me. He was immediately made to retract that statement and toe the party line of sure we were right in invading Iraq and sure Saddam posed a threat to the US.

There have been many columns in Gibbs Magazine and elsewhere that Colin Powell has been sidelined, marginalized, neutered, etc., by the hardliners in the Bush Administration, and he should resign. Indeed, some prominent black reporters and political figures have called for Colin Powell to disassociate himself with this administration and all its actions, by resigning. And from leaks coming out of the White House, Powell will resign as quickly as this Bush first term is over.

This White House's cabal of hawks has treated Secretary Powell disgracefully. And not a one of them has gone to war or has children in this war--so they cannot be harmed by it; and Cheney himself may even be a profiteer in this war. To these aged White House armchair warriors, the Iraqi war is not about making this nation safe. It is about old men vicariously living some manly swagger again. And instead of prescribing for themselves Cialis or a Corvette, they have prescribed a war fantasy with other people dying as they orchestrate their deaths--515 US soldiers dead, over 2,500 wounded, and uncounted Iraqis dead and wounded, as Rumsfeld, who seems to love it the most, and malevolent Dick Cheney, et. al., play out their old man's fantasy. Some argue they are old men too old to fight, but as armchair generals, they love to flex their aged muscles through our young boys and girls going into harm's way, as they talk valiantly and with all the swagger of men in their youth, from secured bunkers.

For Powell, he has allowed himself to be harmed greatly by this iniquitous administration. They have killed any chance he had for being president, and they have showed themselves paternal to the only person among them who seems intelligent and measured, the only one who knows war, who has fought in wars, who has seen soldiers die, and who has been wounded in battle. Ignorance and power are fearful commodities in the hands of old men who have not come to reckoning with their age.

A year ago, Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution called for Colin Powell to resign. I then said that her call was a bit premature, but I now call for Powell to disassociate himself from this sinister Bush Administration by resigning and publicly stating his opposition to the warmongers in the White House; they pose a danger to world peace and have been shown to have perpetrated a fraud upon the American people.

Frank A. Jones