Photo Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty Images/Reuters Colin Powell spent the final years of his life haunted by his February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council, claiming the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq justified military action. It was a shameful performance in which he laid out the phony case—aluminum tubes, satellite photos and the WMDs that never were—with the full moral authority of a four-star general who’d bled for his country. Before he died, Powell called backing the Iraq war a “ blot ” on his record. It was a stain he could never quite wash out. Marco Rubio , at the moment, surely has no such regrets. It seems unlikely he will in the future either. That, more than anything, is what separates these two men, and it tells a sad story about how far U.S. diplomacy has fallen. Read more at The Daily Beast.