{"id":353461,"date":"2021-10-18T21:40:57","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T21:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=373900"},"modified":"2021-10-18T21:40:57","modified_gmt":"2021-10-18T21:40:57","slug":"colin-powell-was-a-nice-man-who-helped-destroy-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/10\/18\/colin-powell-was-a-nice-man-who-helped-destroy-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Colin Powell Was a Nice Man Who Helped Destroy Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI am saddened by the death of Colin Powell without being tried for his crimes in Iraq.\u201d \u2014Muntadher Alzaidi<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Colin Powell is<\/u> being hailed, at his death, as a trailblazer. He certainly was that.<\/p>\n

Raised in the South Bronx by immigrant parents,\u00a0Powell 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 \u2014 and most famously \u2014 he served as America\u2019s first Black secretary of state during the presidency of George W. Bush.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

His contemporaries in\u00a0the U.S. cannot find enough words of praise. \u201cColin Powell was the North Star to a generation of senior American military officers including me,\u201d\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0retired Adm. James Stavridis. For Richard Haass<\/a>, who heads the Council on Foreign Relations, Powell was \u201cthe most intellectually honest person I ever met.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a different story in Iraq, where millions of people likely share the sentiments of Muntadher Alzaidi, who memorably threw his shoes<\/a> at\u00a0George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad. Reacting to Powell\u2019s death today, Alzaidi\u00a0expressed sadness only over the fact that he did not face a war crimes trial for his pivotal role in the invasion of Iraq. \u201cI am sure that the court of God will be waiting for him,\u201d Alzaidi\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter.<\/p>\n\n

Powell\u2019s friends in America tend to briefly note, only in the soft glaze of his own regret, the most consequential act\u00a0of his life. On February 5, 2003, Powell made a 76-minute speech<\/a> to the United Nations Security Council in which he argued the Bush administration\u2019s case for invading Iraq. He insisted that Iraq\u2019s leader, Saddam Hussein, was overseeing a secret program to make weapons of mass destruction.\u00a0Powell 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.<\/p>\n

There was, of course, a big problem with all of his assertions:\u00a0They were lies<\/a>. The intelligence behind his speech was the opposite of emphatic \u2014 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\u2019s presentation, the Bush administration went ahead with its plans, and in the ensuing catastrophe, at least several hundred thousand Iraqis<\/a> lost their lives, as well as more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0published last year, writer Robert Draper traced the what-if of Powell, the most popular member of Bush\u2019s\u00a0post-9\/11 Cabinet, telling the truth when it mattered:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dominoes would have continued to fall. The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, would have almost certainly followed Powell\u2019s example, which meant that the crucial British support for the invasion would have cratered. In the U.S., Draper noted, \u201cDoubters in the upper ranks of the American military \u2014 there were several \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the\u00a0path not taken, because Powell would not stand up to Bush.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t have any choice,\u201d Powell told Draper feebly. \u201cWhat choice did I have? He\u2019s the president.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ironic twist of not just Powell\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u00a0failed watch since 9\/11.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Powell resigned from the Bush administration in\u00a02004 and never really owned up to what he had done. He recognized that his U.N. speech was inaccurate and described it, in an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with journalist Barbara Walters, as \u201cpainful\u201d and a \u201cblot\u201d 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. \u201cI participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council,\u201d Wilkerson has\u00a0said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The \u201cblot\u201d did not matter that much to\u00a0Powell\u2019s\u00a0reputation 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\u00a0Salesforce<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Bloom Energy<\/a>\u00a0and becoming a \u201cstrategic adviser\u201d to the venture capital firm\u00a0Kleiner Perkins<\/a>. (He was already very rich\u00a0\u2014 he had received a $6 million advance<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0his 1995 memoir \u201cMy American Journey.\u201d) He was a trailblazer, in this way, for a generation of retired generals who have coasted into 1 percent status<\/a> thanks to the flattering reviews they receive in cultural and political circles no matter the actual consequences of their government service.<\/p>\n

In fact, there are many levels on which Powell can be described as trailblazing, and it\u2019s complicated to consider them together. As reporter\u00a0Terrell Jermaine Starr<\/a>\u00a0and columnist\u00a0Karen Attiah<\/a>\u00a0noted within hours of Powell\u2019s passing, he was an important and inspiring figure to a large number of Black Americans, particularly before his service in the Bush administration. \u201cI am genuinely sad about Colin Powell\u2019s death\u00a0\u2014 while acknowledging his role in America\u2019s reckless decision to invade Iraq,\u201d Attiah\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Scholar and journalist Marc Lamont Hill struck a similar balance in his assessment today. \u201cAt the personal level, Colin Powell was a nice man,\u201d\u00a0Hill wrote<\/a>. \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The post Colin Powell Was a Nice Man Who Helped Destroy Iraq<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As secretary of state in 2003, Powell lied at the United Nations about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

The post Colin Powell Was a Nice Man Who Helped Destroy Iraq<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":391,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353461"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/391"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353461"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358765,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353461\/revisions\/358765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}