The Colin Powell Lie

Many people in the media business are lying to you today. I won’t.

The subject is Colin Powell, who died this morning. Some of them are lying by not mentioning that he himself lied to you when it mattered most. Others are lying by lionizing The Great Man before noting his “mistake” as an afterthought.

The former U.S. Secretary of State remembered as “painful” his 76 minutes of prevarication while trying to win you over to the cause of invading Iraq, speaking Feb. 5, 2003 at the United Nations. That invasion led to thousands being killed and many more maimed and traumatized, including members of our own armed forces. An entire region of the planet was destabilized, and world terrorism was fostered. American credibility was significantly damaged.

Powell maintained until his death that he was misled about non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and imaginary plans for their use in terror campaigns, by U.S. intelligence. He said he had tried to get it right: Before heading for the U.N., he spent four days in Langley interrogating CIA operatives about the facts he was about to utter. He found some claims inadequately founded, so he pared them from the speech, he said. About the rest, he was apparently well-satisfied.

And yet, in all the intervening years after rallying the nation to unjustified war, he has never called out anyone in the intelligence community for deceiving him. If he was not lying, they must have been. Or they were criminally inept. What kind of misplaced loyalty could possibly warrant protecting them?

Over the years, he repeatedly asserted flatly that his purpose at the U.N. was to back up President George W. Bush’s plans for a new war in Iraq. He didn’t add that he was acting as a guardian of the truth.

There should be no excuse that we needed to evict Saddam Hussein anyway because he was a cruel dictator. If our country invaded every time we encountered human rights violations, much of the world would be afire.

We would have to attack ourselves. As the second Gulf War started, we were torturing prisoners at Guantanamo.

We need to be more realistic about how we wind up in combat. We entered the first Gulf War in 1990 after failing to prepare a response policy for Saddam when he suggested an invasion of Kuwait. If we had told him we would protect Kuwait, no invasion would have taken place.

As chairman of the joint chiefs, Powell ably prosecuted that war. But it was the first of two completely unnecessary American wars in Iraq in 13 years. It didn’t seem to teach Powell anything. At least, not the most important thing. 

If those wars had not occurred, Iraq could certainly be expected to now be a much better place to live, Saddam or no Saddam. The Islamic State might never have risen. Many American and Iraqi soldiers, now dead, might still be alive, and trillions of dollars would have been saved.

Powell was a big part of the failure to maintain peace in Iraq. All his groundbreaking accomplishments listed at the forefront of most of his obituaries are comparative footnotes to history.

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Photo credit: National Museum of African American History