Colin Powell was the first black secretary of state. He was the consummate insider, who climbed the military bureaucracy with great skill and vigor. A man who always knew what had to be done to get ahead and get along. In Vietnam, for example, he understood his role perfectly:
his time as a young U.S. Army Major posted in Saigon, when, after the My Lai Massacre, he was asked to investigate a soldier’s letter describing atrocities against the Vietnamese people. Powell rejected the charges and famously wrote, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”
Most famously, Powell understood that when it’s time to lie in order to attack a country which is no threat to you, that’s what you do: Powell used his high prestige to help sell the Iraq WMD lies. While we’ll never know how many Iraqis died in the ensuring war, because America sure as hell didn’t want to count, we can round it at a million with reasonable justification. Events like the war with ISIS would also never have happened without the Iraq war, and while it doesn’t bother me, it might bother Americans that the Iraq war actually made the US’s international position substantially weaker, and turned Iraq from an Iranian enemy into an ally.
Powell was also “in the room” during the discussions about what sort of torture was acceptable.
Colin Powell’s Legacy
We have a norm in our society that one shouldn’t speak badly of the dead, but it applies to private citizens, not to war criminals. In a just world Colin Powell would have been tried for his war crimes, then hung from the neck till dead, just like America hung Nazis who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, simply for starting aggressive war, because all the deaths and rapes and orphans and torture and other horrors of war come from the simple decision to have one.
Powell certainly wasn’t the worst criminal. He’s a fair bit below Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. One can argue if he was more guilty than Senators who voted for the war like Clinton, but no matter one’s all-star team of war criminals, Powell’s in the deck.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, though it was to many. Powell got where he got by being a yes-man, who did what he had to do for his career. Like many such men he reaped the reward he wanted. It only cost him his soul, and the respect of every decent human.
I don’t like the idea of hell, and even someone like Powell doesn’t deserve eternal torment. So I hope, if there is an afterlife, he simply goes somewhere where he comes to understand what he did wrong, and why.
But none of us who remain on this world should excuse his war crimes; doing so makes other men and women more likely to follow in his footsteps.
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