The nature of modern complex organizations like the United States is that no one person is responsible for everything. You can't so much as get $600 checks to every American without the support of a sizable bureaucracy, let alone single-handedly wage a land war halfway around the world and remake the government of 40 million people.

But that doesn't mean we have to let our sense of morality hold nobody culpable, as if everyone is part of a firing squad and you can't prove who had the blank. Merely signing up for the firing squad shows that you intended to kill, and the responsibility for the death falls on all the people in the squad (as well as all the people who organized it and decided to put a particular prisoner in front of it, etc.), not none of them.

"The US" was only going to war in Iraq because a lot of people arranged things so that it could happen. It's probably true that if any one person decided not to participate, it would still have happened. But if enough people decided not to participate, it wouldn't. And we saw clearly in the last months of the previous presidency that one high-ranking individual can certainly make things a lot more difficult for a president who wants to wage war and that more generally "resistance inside the administration" can be at least partly effective.

I think if we're going to say that an illegal war happened, that people lost their lives because of it, and that it would have been good and moral to try to stop the war, we also need to say that it was bad and immoral to go along with making it happen.

If the standard is that you have to be fully responsible for the war to carry any responsibility for the war, than nobody is responsible. No wonder no one was punished except Judith Miller, lightly.

just because others were ALSO responsible doesn't absolve him of any of the responsibility of all those deaths.

> IMO the responsibility for those deaths does not fall on him specifically.

While this is true, you're not allowed to criticize the flawlessly angelic Intelligence Community on HN.

Holding up the CIA as a bastion of virtue whilst denouncing the public faces of our war crimes is the best way to maintain your karma here. When Tony Blair passes, be sure to dance on his grave too, because the GCHQ puppetmasters did absolutely nothing wrong.

It's always best for one's personal reputation to shoot the messenger, not the man behind the curtain.

I wouldn't hold CIA and other intel agencies up as a bastion of virtue, and I appreciate they've done a lot of terrible things. I can't really make broader moral judgements about how they handle their respective missions, though, since they mostly operate in the dark. All I can say about the CIA, for example, is they're somewhere between A: the most oppressive, lawless, brutal institution to exist post WW2, and B: flawed saviors of humanity from nuclear/other apocalypse. Who really knows? Those that do probably can't say much.

Intel agencies do have the problem that if they go off the rails, there's not many paths to reform outside of direct involvement. I also strongly suspect that they're doing some terrible and unnecessary things to this day (e.g. still ruining lives in a protracted battle with Marx's ghost) and need reform, but that's really the strongest claim I can make.

> Holding up the CIA as a bastion of virtue whilst denouncing the public faces of our war crimes is the best way to maintain your karma here.

You’re joking, right? The CIA is shit on all the time. It’s a fucking joke just like most other state run agencies that are all self-interested and don’t actually look out for the public good.

The CIA is responsible for huge amounts of horrible shit across the entire world. Constantly instilling puppet dictators and destabilizing countries for generations now - all for the glory of US capitalism and imperialism.

Doesn’t mean Colin Powell is absolved either. Everyone involved is to blame. Even the voters.

I guess the war was nobody's doing, huh? Powell just jumped on the bandwagon when was was already inevitable. Blair thought the US was implacable, and wanted to bring the UN along so the UN didn't look powerless. GWB was a lovable idiot, whose only mistake was having too much faith in his advisers.

It's true what they say - success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

That’s a pretty big leap in logic. GWB, Rumsfeld, Cheney et al we’re all very clearly responsible for the mess that unfolded. I was simply pointing out that Powell had a peripheral role in the events. Not absolving him, but I feel like Powell gets an outsize level of attention because his actions were public and broadcast. It gives those scheming behind the scenes (even before 9/11) a free pass.