Colin Powell, U.S. secretary of state from 2001 to 2005, died at the age of 84 on Monday of complications from COVID-19. If the opinion polls are to be believed, in the run-up to the election of George W. Bush in the 1990s, Colin Powell was more popular than Bush. He was nearly universally admired by the American public, Liberal, centrist, and conservative alike. Yet, by 2005 he was fired as the secretary of state and has been one of the faces most synonymous with U.S. war crimes in the 21st century.
On 25 December 1962, as Viet Cong soldiers were winning the war against the American allies in Vietnam, 25-year-old Captain Powell arrived in Vietnam to advise a 400-strong unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), part of a contingent that rose the number of American advisors from 3,200 to 11,000. His unit moved through dense and dangerous terrain, frequently coming under fire from Viet Cong fighters.
They burnt down houses, disrupted water supplies, and terrorized the civilians. "We burned down the thatched huts, starting the blaze with Ronson and Zippo lighters," Powell recalled. "Why were we torching houses and destroying crops? Ho Chi Minh had said the people were like the sea in which his guerrillas swam. ... We tried to solve the problem by making the whole sea uninhabitable. In the hard logic of war, what difference did it make if you shot your enemy or starved him to death?"
After six months in combat, Powell stood on a punji trap, a bamboo spike hidden in the ground which pierced his foot. He spent the remainder of his tour in division headquarters in Hue. But, determined to make a career in the military, a plan he had decided at college where he became the leader of a thousand-student reserve regiment, he persevered and moved up the ranks.
Whereas other officers, shocked at American tactics in Vietnam, resigned from their posts, Powell toed the line. He took the rank of Major before his 30th birthday. At a desk job, he would cover up the deaths of 347 Vietnamese at My Lai, where American soldiers indiscriminately killed unarmed civilians, including babies and children.
Powell’s time in Vietnam would shape his outlook on the relationship between civilian and military leaders. The upper-echelons of the Department of Defense and the White House were split between those who were old enough to have served in the Second World War and those who hadn’t. When George W. Bush was elected in 2001, his senior positions were filled by people, like Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who had dodged the draft, and Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice who were too old or young to have served in Vietnam.
In 1983, at the height of the Lebanese war following the invasion by Israel the previous year, the famous Powell Doctrine was conceived. Ronald Reagen had sent 1,800 troops to Beirut to help stabilize a region that was becoming increasingly vital to U.S. economic success. But when a truck bomb exploded in the U.S. encampment killing 241 Americans, and the remaining troops withdrew to the Mediterranean Sea, a shift in Washington’s foreign policy was called for.
Originally known as the Weinberger Doctrine, after the then secretary of defense under Reagan, it laid out a list of key criteria to guide American military power through the decades following the Beirut disaster. Walter LaFeber, in his article “The Rise and Fall of Colin Powell and the Powell Doctrine,” describes the terms of the new paradigm:
“First, the ‘engagement’ must be ‘deemed vital to [American] national interest or that of our allies.’ Second, U.S. forces should only be sent ‘with the clear intention of winning.’ Third, in putting American lives at stake, ‘we should have clearly defined political and military obligations.’ Fourth, the size and purpose of the force sent out to fight should be ‘continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary—as had clearly not occurred when the situations in Vietnam and Lebanon rapidly changed.”
“Fifth, troops should be assured, before they go abroad to fight and possibly die, that they have ‘the support of the American people and...Congress.’ Finally, and what would become of special importance to Powell over the next twenty years, Weinberger declared that ‘the commitment of U.S. forces to combat should be a last resort.’”
Powell served as National Security Advisor to Regan from 1987 to 1989, and then as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to George H. W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, where he tried to implement the Weinberger/Powell doctrine. He overlooked U.S. military adventures in Central America and then led the war against Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait. He tried to argue against Secretary of Defence Dick Cheney and Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz’s rush for war in 1991.
550,000 U.S. troops were deployed to the Gulf. It’s estimated that between 20,000 and 35,000 Iraqi troops were killed, together with between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians.
But it’s for his part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Powell will be remembered. When he sat before the UN Security Council and knowingly lied about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction he was securing his legacy in an unknown number of Iraqi lives. The medical journal The Lancet estimated that approximately 600,000 people died as a result of the invasion by June 2006.
His speech to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003, which he later insisted he regretted, is the pinnacle of American deception in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” he said during the briefing. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
The most telling detail of the speech is not what Powell said, however, but what had happened behind the scenes at the U.N. earlier in the week. A reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, a roughly 3.5m by 7.9m commemoration to the murder of civilians by Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War, which hung at the entrance of the Security Council was covered up by a blue curtain. It would seem contradictory, it was deemed, to be seen standing in front of the reproduction after Powell made his speech to the Security Council.
In 1956, during a debate about the best home for Guernica, Picasso said “It will do the most good in America.” History won’t remember well leaders who push for war, especially those whose main justifications for said war were lies.
