Six on History: Colin Powell's Legacy
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1) Blinken pays tribute to Colin Powell, Yahoo News
Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld wanted to go to war with Iraq even though the administration had no good reason for doing so, because, he said, Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, had “a lot of good targets.”
Deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, similarly, argued for the invasion because it was “doable,” at one point saying he didn’t care about “allies, coalitions, and diplomacy.”
Dick Cheney was literally the mastermind of a global torture apparatus, which is not something your average evil psychopath can say. In 2006, Cheney shot one of his hunting buddies in the face, permanently disfiguring and disabling him, an accident for which he has apparently never apologized.
These ghouls exuded what we now call “toxic masculinity,” and hating them has always been easy. Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, who died today at eighty-four of complications of COVID-19, had quite a different vibe, exuding quiet dignity, deliberative reason, and calm. Yet he was also a war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings. In that way he was no better than Rumsfeld, Cheney, or Wolfowitz.
Powell, who served in the army for thirty-five years and was national security adviser to Ronald Reagan, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W Bush, and George W. Bush’s secretary of state, was so popular that people in both parties begged him to run for president for decades. Powell has also been celebrated by liberals because, even though he served in Republican administrations, he welcomed the presidency of Barack Obama as “transformative” and opposed Donald Trump, correctly believing him a dangerous racist.
All this is true, but Powell presided over — and used his tremendous credibility to legitimate — a war that he almost certainly knew was wrong. As a result, about half a million people died.
After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Powell privately opposed invading Iraq, warning that doing so would destabilize the region and distract the United States from fighting terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. Powell was isolated from the warmongers in the Bush White House, and often excluded from their meetings, because they knew he wasn’t a true believer in their war.
Precisely for that reason, Bush asked him to be the one to make the case for war at the United Nations (UN), and on February 5, 2003, Powell gave a seventy-six-minute speech to the UN, arguing that Saddam Hussein was a danger to the world, and the United States needed to invade Iraq and take him out. Powell at times looked uncomfortable while doing this, and he later told Barbara Walters in a TV interview that it had been “painful” for him to make the speech. He said in 2011 that the war would be a “blot on his record.”
He’s right. Because Powell was who he was, his speech at the United Nations persuaded many — probably millions — of Americans to support the war. A large section of the DC commentariat who had been ambivalent about the war capitulated in the wake of the speech. Data from several different studies showed that 10 percent of Americans, after seeing Powell’s speech, were moved from opposition to support for the Iraq War. The effect was strongest among Democrats. The speech also caused a 30 percent jump in the number of people who falsely believed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
The following year, UN secretary general Kofi Annan called the war in Iraq illegal. Under the UN charter, aggression by member states must be justifiable either as self-defense or sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Many international law experts agreed with Annan. This makes the Bush White House a gang of war criminals in a very precise sense. But Powell should have been given his own special day in the dock at the Hague for his unique role in persuading the public to support the crime.
Iraqis are not mourning Colin Powell. Many, however, are mourning family, friends and neighbors who died as a direct result of Powell’s lapse of integrity. “He lied, lied and lied,” an Iraqi writer and mother of two told the Associated Press today. “He lied, and we are the ones who got stuck with never-ending wars.” Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who famously threw a shoe at President Bush during a 2008 news conference, tweeted that he was sad that Powell had died without being tried for his war crimes against the Iraqi people.
Colin Powell’s UN address and its phenomenal impact on public opinion were oddly of the moment. Powell seemed like he could be a character on The West Wing, a Bill Clinton–era TV show created by Aaron Sorkin and beloved by many liberals, in which the ethical agonies of the powerful were portrayed with unbounded empathy. The message was supposed to be a reassuring one: Your administration is run by decent people who are trying their best, and when they do terrible things, it’s because they have no choice. Powell’s Hamlet-like anguish extended that halo to the George W. Bush administration, one of the worst in the country’s history.
In his way, Colin Powell was actually worse than Donald Rumsfeld. He made it appear that even the most murderous and indefensible decisions of our elites, however distressing, are reasonable and inevitable, the result of sober deliberation. He made the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians look justified. He enjoyed the trust of millions, yet he lied. I’m inclined to agree with al-Zaidi: The only sad thing about Colin Powell’s death is that he’ll never be punished for his crimes."
“I am saddened by the death of Colin Powell without being tried for his crimes in Iraq.” —Muntadher Alzaidi
Colin Powell is being hailed, at his death, as a trailblazer. He certainly was that.
Raised in the South Bronx by immigrant parents, Powell was a graduate of the City College of New York and rose through the ranks of the U.S. military to become chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush during the Persian Gulf War. After that — and most famously — he served as America’s first Black secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush.
His contemporaries in the U.S. cannot find enough words of praise. “Colin Powell was the North Star to a generation of senior American military officers including me,” wrote retired Adm. James Stavridis. For Richard Haass, who heads the Council on Foreign Relations, Powell was “the most intellectually honest person I ever met.”
It’s a different story in Iraq, where millions of people likely share the sentiments of Muntadher Alzaidi, who memorably threw his shoes at George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. Reacting to Powell’s death today, Alzaidi expressed sadness only over the fact that he did not face a war crimes trial for his pivotal role in the invasion of Iraq. “I am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him,” Alzaidi wrote on Twitter.
Powell’s friends in America tend to briefly note, in the soft glaze of his own regret, the most consequential act of his life. On February 5, 2003, Powell made a 76-minute speech to the United Nations Security Council in which he argued the Bush administration’s case for invading Iraq. He insisted that Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, was overseeing a secret program to make weapons of mass destruction. Powell brandished satellite photos of what he confidently said were decontamination trucks, aluminum tubes, and other WMD paraphernalia. He even held up a vial that he said could contain anthrax.
There was, of course, a big problem with all of his assertions: They were lies. The intelligence behind his speech was the opposite of emphatic — it was false, manipulated, and fabricated. The trucks were just trucks. The tubes were just tubes. There was no anthrax. There was, more fundamentally, no reason to invade Iraq. Nonetheless, thanks to Powell’s presentation, the Bush administration went ahead with its plans, and in the ensuing catastrophe, at least several hundred thousand Iraqis lost their lives, as well as more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers.
There is no shortage of senior officials in the Bush era who had a higher quotient of intentional malignance than Powell. We know their names well: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, and, of course, Bush himself. But Powell was unique in a way that does not flatter his legacy: He was perhaps the only public figure who could have stopped the White House from going ahead with its lunatic invasion, and he failed to do so. In a lengthy article published last year, writer Robert Draper traced the what-if of Powell, the most popular member of Bush’s post-9/11 Cabinet, telling the truth when it mattered:
What if that same voice that publicly proclaimed the necessity of invading Iraq had instead told Bush privately that it was not merely an invitation to unintended consequences but a mistake, as he personally believed it to be? What if he said no to Bush when he asked him to speak before the U.N.? Powell would almost certainly have been obligated to resign, and many if not all of his top staff members involved in the Iraq issue would also have quit.
Dominoes would have continued to fall. The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, would have almost certainly followed Powell’s example, which meant that the crucial British support for the invasion would have cratered. In the U.S., Draper noted, “Doubters in the upper ranks of the American military — there were several — would have been empowered to speak out; intelligence would have been reexamined; Democrats, now liberated from the political pressures of the midterm election, would most likely have joined the chorus.”
That was the path not taken, because Powell would not stand up to Bush.
“I didn’t have any choice,” Powell told Draper feebly. “What choice did I have? He’s the president.”
The ironic twist of not just Powell’s career but also the careers of so many American generals is that they abjectly lacked, when the moment called for it, the one thing that soldiers are supposed to possess in abundance: courage. The history of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is filled with U.S. generals who were lauded as heroes but lacked the guts or honesty to stand up to the whims and dictates of their superiors. Millions of people have been killed and injured on their failed watch since 9/11
Powell resigned from the Bush administration in 2004 and never really owned up to what he had done. He recognized that his U.N. speech was inaccurate and described it, in an interview with celebrity journalist Barbara Walters, as “painful” and a “blot” on his career. Those comments, not long after he left office, were pretty much as far as he would ever go in terms of introspection or criticism. He was unable to admit the truth that his chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson now acknowledges. “I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council,” Wilkerson has said.
The “blot” did not matter that much to Powell’s reputation in the U.S., because after the Iraq disaster, he continued to blaze a lucrative path in the corporate world, joining the board of directors of Salesforce and Bloom Energy and becoming a “strategic adviser” to the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. (He was already very rich — he had received a $6 million advance for his 1995 memoir “My American Journey.”) He was a trailblazer, in this way, for a generation of retired generals who have coasted into 1 percent status thanks to the flattering reviews they receive in cultural and political circles no matter the actual consequences of their government service.
In fact, there are many levels on which Powell can be described as trailblazing, and it’s complicated to consider them together. As reporter Terrell Jermaine Starr and columnist Karen Attiah noted within hours of Powell’s passing, he was an important and inspiring figure to a large number of Black Americans, particularly before his service in the Bush administration. “I am genuinely sad about Colin Powell’s death — while acknowledging his role in America’s reckless decision to invade Iraq,” Attiah wrote on Twitter.
Scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill struck a similar balance in his assessment today. “At the personal level, Colin Powell was a nice man,” Hill wrote. “He was also a trailblazer. But he was also a military leader and key strategist of an empire that killed countless people and undermined the sovereignty of multiple nations. In our memorials, we must be honest about all of this.”
" ... Unfortunately, Powell marshaled that reputation and power in service of a terrible misdeed: making the Bush administration’s most powerful case for the Iraq War. Powell went on to express at least some regret for his part in the invasion, and his legacy cannot be reduced to this one chapter of his career. But in this instance, his judgment was so poor and his actions were so consequential that any discussion of his legacy must include a reckoning with his complicity in one of the most heinous foreign policy decisions in modern American history.
In the run-up to the Iraq War, Powell was skeptical of the wisdom of invading Iraq and argued in high-level meetings for the U.S. to work on coalition-building against Iraq at the United Nations instead of rushing to invade it. In private conversations, he described invading the country to topple Saddam Hussein as foolish. But he never expressed outright opposition to the president.
Powell once famously told Bush during a private dinner in August 2002 that invading Iraq could go wrong and define his presidential legacy. “You break it, you’re going to own it,” he told Bush in a widely cited line. But when Bush asked him point-blank, “What should I do?” Powell did not say he thought the U.S. should not invade Iraq. Instead he suggested going to the U.N.
Eventually the U.N. became the site of the United States' most powerful and agenda-setting case for the Iraq War, and it was Powell who made that argument. The Bush administration chose Powell to address the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 precisely because he was immensely popular, had bipartisan appeal and was regarded as a straight shooter.
... It would later turn out that Powell’s more refined and rigorous version of the speech was also, well, horse manure. While in many mainstream media accounts Powell is portrayed as a victim of poor intelligence — and he himself benefited from implying this was the case — there are, in fact, many indicators that he knew he was using poor intelligence and actively manipulating it to strengthen the case for war.
As The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz wrote in 2018, Powell obscured his private doubts and projected false confidence about the case for Iraq by knowingly exaggerating, cherry-picking or distorting questionable intelligence despite warnings from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research about the credibility of the claims he was using. Even Powell’s own chief of staff at the time later confessed that “it didn’t seem to matter to us that we used shoddy or cherry-picked intelligence” to make the case for war. ... "
"Bob Kerrey is lost in the haze of Vietnam. As he has contended with the public revelation that the Navy SEAL team he led killed a dozen or so civilians during a nighttime mission in 1969 (accidentally, he and five colleagues maintain; not-so-accidentally, says one team member), his recollections have shifted. “Please understand,” he told journalist Gregory Vistica, who uncovered this story, “that my memory of this event is clouded by the fog of the evening, age and desire.”
His is not an uncommon fog, as attested to by other vets. The hell of Vietnam—an unpopular war that involved hard-to-discern guerrilla combatants, brutal depopulation strategies, indiscriminate bombing and much “collateral damage,” as military bureaucrats called civilian kills—offers its distinct challenges to memory, the individual memories of many who served there and the collective memory of the nation that sent them and sponsored a dirty war of free-fire zones and destroy-the-village-to-save-the-village tactics. In reviewing Colin Powell’s military service recently, I found that Powell had his own trouble in setting the record straight on his involvement—tangential as it was—in one of the war’s more traumatic episodes.
As Powell notes in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journal, in 1969 he was an Army major, the deputy operations officer of the Americal Division, stationed at division headquarters in Chu Lai. He says that in March of that year, an investigator from the inspector general’s office of Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) paid a call. In a “Joe Friday monotone,” the investigator shot questions at Powell about Powell’s position at the division and the division’s operational journals, of which Powell was the custodian. The inspector then asked Powell to produce the journals for March 1968. Powell started to explain that he had not been with the division at that time. “Just get the journal,” the IG man snapped, “and go through that month’s entries. Let me know if you find an unusual number of enemy killed on any day.”
Powell flipped through the records and came upon an entry from March 16, 1968. The journal noted that a unit of the division had reported a body count of 128 enemy dead on the Batangan Peninsula. “In this grinding, grim, but usually unspectacular warfare,” Powell writes, “that was a high number.” The investigator requested that Powell read the number into the tape recorder he had brought, and that was essentially the end of the interview. “He left,” Powell recalls, “leaving me as mystified as to his purpose as when he arrived.”
It would not be until two years later (according to the original version of Powell’s book) or six months later (according to the paperback version of the book) that Powell figured out that the IG official had been probing what was then a secret, the My Lai massacre. Not until the fall of 1969 did the world learned that on March 16, 1968, troops from the Americal Division, under the command of Lieut. William Calley, killed scores of men, women and children in that hamlet. “Subsequent investigation revealed that Calley and his men killed 347 people,” Powell writes. “The 128 enemy ‘kills’ I had found in the journal formed part of the total.”
Though he does not say so expressly, Powell leaves the impression that the IG investigation, using information provided by Powell, uncovered the massacre, for which Calley was later court-martialed. That is not accurate.
RELATED ARTICLEThe transcript of the tape-recorded interview between the IG man—Lieut. Col. William Sheehan—and Powell tells a different story. During that session—which actually happened on May 23, 1969—the IG investigator did request that Powell take out the division’s operations journals covering the first three weeks of March. (The IG inquiry had been triggered by letters written to the Pentagon, the White House and twenty-four members of Congress by Ron Ridenhour, a former serviceman who had learned about the mass murders.) Sheehan examined the records. Then he asked Powell to say for the record what activity had transpired in “grid square BS 7178” in this period. “The most significant of these occurred on 16, March, 1968,” Powell replied, “beginning at 0740 when C Company, 1st of the 20th, then under Task Force Barker, and the 11th Infantry Brigade, conducted a combat assault into a hot LZ [landing zone].” He noted that C Company, after arriving in the landing zone, killed one Vietcong. About fifteen minutes later, the same company, backed up by helicopter gunships, killed three VC. In the following hour, the gunships killed three more VC, while C Company “located documents and equipment” and killed fourteen Vietcong. “There is no indication of the nature of the action which caused these fourteen VC KIA,” Powell said. Later that morning, C Company, according to the journal, captured a shortwave radio and detained twenty-three VC suspects for questioning, while two other companies that were also part of Task Force Barker were active in the same area without registering any enemy kills.
Powell did not find in the journals any evidence suggesting something terribly amiss had happened in My Lai. No suspicious numbers of enemy killed, such as the 128 figure he recounts in his memoirs. The official records merely reflected what Powell had referred to as “a hot combat assault” during the IG interview. Seven weeks later, the MACV IG recommended that the case be closed, but a Pentagon IG investigation was already under way, and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division was soon pursuing an inquiry. The matter could not be smothered, and in November of 1969, journalist Seymour Hersh exposed C Company’s massacre of civilians at My Lai.
There had been attempts at cover-up. Prior to Ridenhour’s letter, the Army promoted the story that C Company had killed 128 VC and captured three weapons in the March 16 action. (Note the 128 figure—which Powell, in his memoirs, uses in describing the number of enemy kills he supposedly found in the journals. In his book, he is repeating the cover story, not recalling what was actually in the journal.) And information pertaining to My Lai disappeared from the Americal Division’s files. A military review panel—convened after the Hersh stories to determine why the initial investigations did not uncover the truth of My Lai—found that senior officers of the Americal Division had destroyed evidence to protect their comrades. Powell keeps that out of his account.
Powell has never been implicated in any of the wrongdoing involving My Lai. No evidence ties him to the attempted cover-up. But he was part of an institution (and a division) that tried hard to keep the story of My Lai hidden—a point unacknowledged in his autobiography. Moreover, several months before he was interviewed by Sheehan, Powell was ordered to look into allegations made by another former GI that US troops had “without provocation or justification” killed civilians. (These charges did not mention My Lai specifically.) Powell mounted a most cursory examination. He did not ask the accuser for more specific information. He interviewed a few officers and reported to his superiors that there was nothing to the allegations [see “Questions for Powell,” The Nation, January 8/15, 2001]. This exercise is not mentioned in his memoirs.
