FORMER SEC. OF STATE, COLIN POWELL ONCE TOLD THE PRESIDENT: “YOU BREAK IT, YOU OWN IT”

 

                   …Powell had deep misgivings regarding the invasion of Iraq

 

Colin Powell, 84, died from the complications of the Coronavirus

 

Powell’s family said in a statement that he had been treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and his family added that he had been fully vaccinated.

Powell also had a blood cancer that seriously lowered his immunity to any infections, including Covid 19.

Powell was born in New York to Jamaican immigrants, and General Powell rose rapidly through the Army to become the youngest and first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His climb was helped by a string of jobs as a military assistant to high-level government officials and a stint as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan. Powell was considered charming, articulate and skilled at managing.

Powell helped guide the U.S. military to victory in the 1991 Persian Gulf War as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  But he struggled a decade later over his support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

While hailed on his retirement from public service at the end of Bush's first term, Gen. Powell was also criticized for not pushing harder to block the Iraq War or for not quitting in protest.

In his defense, Gen. Powell cited a sense of duty and obedience to presidential authority. “It’s just like in the military, you argue, you debate something, but once the president has made a decision, that becomes a decision for the Cabinet,” he said this on CNN’s “Larry King Live” show in 2009.

It was not known until after his position as the Secretary of State that he had argued for not employing such U.S. military power in Iraq.  He also felt that when he presented the U.S. case for war to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, it was mistake and a “blot on his career”.

His 75-minute speech at the U.N., asserting that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, proved deeply embarrassing when no weapons were found after the invasion. He told an interviewer several years later that the speech would remain “painful for him to accept.”

A pragmatist and a strong believer in international alliances, Gen. Powell often found himself the odd-man-out in an administration dominated by neoconservative ideologues who were dubious about the usefulness of the United Nations and NATO.

Gen. Powell's power and influence were frequently undercut by more hardline colleagues, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.  They both viewed him at times as being too solicitous of foreign interests and insufficiently supportive of Bush's vision for the muscular exercise of American power.

Other than his well-known reservations about military intervention, Gen. Powell was not given to grand principles. He saw himself primarily as a problem-solver and expert manager.

Gen. Powell was able to claim some victories early on. In his first year as secretary, he won the release from China of the crew of a U.S. surveillance plane that had made an emergency landing after colliding with a Chinese plane over the South China Sea.  The collision killed a Chinese pilot.

He also averted the pullout of U.S. troops from NATO peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, and he facilitated the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty without provoking a harsh Russian backlash.

Even though he had told President Bush that: “You break it, you own it!”  (This was also known as the “Pottery Barn Rule”)  Gen. Powell eventually threw his substantial public credibility behind the president’s decision to attack Iraq.  He also agreed to Bush’s request to present the U.S. case for war to the U.N. Security Council, which he later regretted.

"Serving as a brake on rash presidential actions and misguided policies was not the forward-looking role Powell had envisioned for himself as the nation's chief diplomat,” Washington Post journalist Karen DeYoung wrote this in “Soldier,” her 2006 biography of Gen. Powell.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, when the idea of attacking Iraq first arose, Gen. Powell helped persuade President Bush to stay focused on striking the al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.  Throughout 2002, Gen. Powell continued trying to slow the march to war with Iraq, warning Bush in a meeting in August that an invasion could destabilize the Middle East and shackle the United States with a great reconstruction burden, which ended up being very true.

Gen. Powell's bureaucratic battles within the Bush administration persisted throughout the first term, and Bush, after winning reelection in 2004, asked for the secretary's resignation. “I left with some disappointment,” he said on Larry King’s talk show, acknowledging that he had been “somewhat off frequency with other Bush advisers.”  That was a highly understated comment.

During Donald Trump’s tumultuous term in office, Gen. Powell became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of that president, who threatened and encouraged the use of force against racial-justice activists in 2020. Powell scorched Trump’s ethics and accused other Republicans of accommodating the president out of political self-interest.

“The one word I have to use with respect to what he’s been doing for the last several years is the word I would never have used before, never would have used with any of the four presidents I worked for: He lies,” General Powell said this on CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “He lies about things, and he gets away with it because his people will not hold him accountable.”

When Gen. Powell announced his support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden over Trump in the 2020 election, Trump used the Iraq invasion as an example, calling Powell “a real stiff who was very responsible for getting us into the disastrous Middle East Wars.”

And when Trump fomented a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after months of falsely claiming that Democrats had stolen the election, General Powell announced that he no longer considered the Republican Party his political home. “Right now I’m just watching my country,” he said, “and am not concerned with parties.”

Republicans, he told CNN, “would not stand up and tell the truth or stand up and criticize him or criticize others. And that’s what we need. We need people who will speak the truth, who remember that they are here for our fellow citizens. They are here for our country. They are not here simply to be reelected again.”

Colin Powell will be seriously missed as a true American patriot and a highly successful public servant.

Copyright G. Ater 2021