Unique

19 October 2021

 

Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Colin Powell, 1937-2021

 

General Colin Powell died yesterday from complications related to Covid-19. He had been an army officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. That he was the first black man to serve in the latter three offices is important to note, but it is incidental to his achievements. The Powell Doctrine defines US use of military force to this day. His speech at the UN urging the attack on Iraq in 2003 was the nadir of his career, but in owning up to that failure, he reduced much of the criticism. His was a uniquely American life.

The son of Jamaican immigrants growing up in the South Bronx in the 1940s was not the most promising of starts. He was, without doubt, what he was despite that beginning. He found his way into City College, one of New York's great public universities, and then the army thanks to the ROTC program. For 35 years, including two tours of duty in Vietnam, he wore his country's uniform. As part of that, he investigated the massacre at My Lai, where a US unit simply went berserk and murdered 347 civilians.

He wrote, "My Lai was an appalling example of much that had gone wrong in Vietnam . . . . The involvement of so many unprepared officers and non-coms led to breakdowns in morale, discipline, and professional judgment -- and to horrors like My Lai -- as the troops became numb to what appeared to be endless and mindless slaughter." The extent to which he and the upper echelons did much about it is a matter of debate. Yet General Powell's future advice to presidents on the use of force would be conditioned by the Vietnam experience.

That led him to develop what has been dubbed the Powell Doctrine in the use of military resources. First, define the objective. Second, secure public support for achieving the objecting. Third, go in with overwhelming force to shorten the conflict and keep casualties down. Every US military action since Desert Storm kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait has relied on these principles.

The administration of George Bush the Lesser was aching to attack Iraq despite the fact that the 9/11 murderers trained in Afghanistan. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained the day after, "there are no good targets in Afghanistan," so he wanted Iraq invaded instead. The pretext would be that the Saddamite regime was violating UN resolutions by possessing weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, biological and/or chemical). That the Iraqis had none was irrelevant. Vice President Dick Cheney and his minions "stove-piped" intelligence that they wanted the president to see while denying him access to contradictory information. In the end, they sent General Powell to the UN Security Council to make the case for an attack.

"My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources," he said in his 75-minute long briefing on February 5, 2003. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence." Except it was not true.

"There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me," General Powell said in a 2005 interview with ABC News.

He could have claimed he had been misled, lied to, so that he might avoid blame, but instead, he took his portion of responsibility. He referred to the speech as a "blot" on his record. "I'm the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record," he told ABC News. "It was painful. It's painful now."

Owning up to mistakes has gone out of style. General Powell demonstrated how useful that can be.

© Copyright 2021 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.


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