{"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 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