The death of Colin Powell at age 84 has brought forth lots of eulogies and a few accurate criticisms, like this one, posted at Forever Wars by Spencer Ackerman, author of Reign of Terror How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America And Produced Trump. Ackerman focuses almost exclusively on what one might call the “mysterious incident of Colin Powell” during the lead up to the second Gulf War, since Powell, in effect, did nothing—nothing constructive, at least. But even among Powell’s critics I am a bit of an outlier, since Powell always struck me as a bit of an empty suit.
Powell’s one seemingly great achievement, of course, is the “Powell Doctrine”, unfortunately far more praised than practiced. Impressive and indeed admirable in theory, the doctrine was in fact belied by the circumstance of its genesis, the first Gulf War, which was far less of an unalloyed triumph than is generally remembered. Most of all, it was not an example of the “correct” application of the supposed Powell Doctrine, which, according to Wikipedia, requires that the following questions be answered with a “Yes”:
Is a vital national security interest threatened?
Do we have a clear attainable objective?
Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?
Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?
Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?
Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?
Is the action supported by the American people?
Do we have genuine broad international support?
The thing is, the Bush administration could never have honestly answered “yes” to any of these questions, except the last. President Bush never explained why Saddam’s seizure of all of Kuwait would threaten a “vital national interest” of the United States. Instead, he presented the case for war entirely in moral terms, claiming to be horrified by reports of mass rapes on the part of Iraqi soldiers invading Kuwait. In his efforts to drum up support for the war, Bush repeatedly accused Saddam of being “worse” than Hitler—for reportedly using U.S. citizens as human shields—and privately told administration officials that he would conduct the invasion even if Congress voted against it, because Saddam was so depraved. Yet it was settled administration policy that Saddam would be allowed to remain in power after the war, which was intended to be nothing more than a reprimand, to remind Saddam who was boss.
But this is far from the worst. In March 1988, Saddam had actually used his infamous “weapons of mass destruction” against Kurdish minorities in Iraq, killing over 3,000 Kurds with nerve gas in Halaba, Iraq. Shortly afterwards, Bush’s ambassador to Iraq personally told Saddam that the U.S. desired a “deeper, broader” relationship with Iraq. Then, in the lead up to the war, Bush explicitly encouraged Kurdish minorities to revolt against Saddam, even while knowing that Saddam would be kept in power, thus allowing him to murder the Kurdish rebels at his leisure once the bombs stopped falling. Saddam’s murderous repression of the hapless Kurds, first set up and then heartlessly abandoned by Bush, set off a mass migration of one million Kurds into neighboring Turkey. Gee, a “noble” use of U.S. military force resulting in thousands of needless deaths and a disruptive flood of immigrants into an unwilling host country. Sound familiar? Even when the Powell Doctrine “worked”, it didn’t work.
The extreme contrast between Bush’s moral packaging for the war, and its brutal realpolitik content, plus the simple need of the Republican Party for another Cold War, quickly created “overwhelming”—among Republicans, at least—pressure for a second Gulf war. The Republicans were set on the invasion of Iraq long before the Twin Towers fell. The 9/11 attack simply offered the second Bush administration the “perfect” excuse for doing what it had always intended to do in the first place.
It has always been my “theory” that Powell was spoiled by the adulation that descended upon him after Gulf 1. I can imagine—I have to, of course, because I was never there—that Powell “found himself” surrounded by bevies of Upper East Side hostesses telling him “You will save us, General! You will be the black George Washington!” The black George Washington! That has kind of a ring to it!
But it was not to be. Insiders like Bob Woodward all say that Powell simply lacked the “fire in the belly” for a presidential race, but I think it’s more complex than that.1 I think Powell thought, at first, that the nomination/presidency would simply be handed to him by a grateful party/nation, like, you know, George Washington. But, as I say, it was not to be. My old pal Dan Drezner, who somehow almost always finds a way to say something I disagree with, quotes with full approval a statement by Matt K. Lewis that “there is reason to believe that Powell was Ronald Reagan’s vision of the Republican Party’s bright future”, a statement that I regard as pure, unadulterated balderdash .
Powell was a Rockefeller Republican, literally anathema to “true conservatives”. In particular, he was “moderate” on both affirmative action and abortion. “Conservatives” still refuse to acknowledge the profound hostility of Ronald Reagan and most “real conservatives” to the American civil rights movement. Reagan’s presidency was deeply committed to the uprooting of every affirmative action policy it could find, inventing a “color-blind” constitution—color-blind and deaf and dumb, one might say2—that had never existed before, to facilitate this uprooting. Reagan, and his buddies on the bench, like Rehnquist and Scalia, never complained when government discrimination injured blacks, but when it helped them, that was a different matter.[3]
If Powell had been a Clarence Thomas conservative, one who openly hated the whole welfare state and religiously opposed abortion, he might very well have won the Republican nomination. But by 1996 a Republican moderate, unless he enjoyed the advantages of incumbency like George H. W. Bush or Bob Dole, could never get the job. The “big sort”, though it wouldn’t manifest itself dramatically at the presidential level until 2000, was well underway. By 1996, Powell, though scornful of the Democratic ignorance of, and lack of respect for, the military, was no longer a “real” Republican, though he didn’t know it yet.
It was, again, I think, Powell’s unwarranted assumption that he didn’t have to “earn it” that set him up for his most grievous fall, as secretary of state under George W. Bush. Unlike Condoleezza Rice, Powell never realized that George didn’t forgive people who talked down to him. Powell didn’t realize, until it was far too late, that the second invasion of Iraq was a done deal even before the towers had finished falling. In fact, as Fred Kaplan explains over at Slate, Powell was constantly outmaneuvered and disrespected as secretary of state from the get-go, by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—and George Bush—already high on the Kool-Aid of American omnipotence. When Bush had talked about a “humbler” foreign policy, what he really meant was one where we don’t cooperate with anyone anymore, especially those goddamn fairies at the UN. No UN, all USA!
It was, I think, Powell’s love for the perks of office, and his hunger for approval, that kept him in office, though he surely knew that Cheney and Rumsfeld were laughing at him behind his back and simply using him as a front man for their own purposes. But he still got the big office, and the people at State did love him, were proud of him, and felt that he made State almost as important as they thought it should be. All this led Powell to prostitute his name for the benefit of people who, for the most part, scarcely bothered to conceal their contempt for him, leaving him, really, a pathetic figure, a puppet of men who he, in turn, scarcely could have respected.
Both Spencer Akerman and Vanneman favorite Daniel Larison (subscription required) point out that Powell was quite complicit in crafting the Bush administration’s utterly fraudulent “case” for the entirely unnecessary, immoral, and counter-productive invasion of Iraq long before his famous/infamous speech to the UN, which very unfortunately made support of the invasion “respectable” and which has deservedly tarnished his name. As Larison points out, Bush made his intentions publicly clear as early as his 2002 State of the Union address, and thereafter confirmed it, saying in the summer of that year, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” In other words, we should act on speculation rather than evidence—because, of course, Bush and his cadre didn’t see Iraq as a threat to the U.S. at all. They simply wanted to send an American army into the Middle East as an end in itself.
By this time, Powell had realized that Bush did not tolerate dissent on issues he cared about, and he was quick to fall in line. As Larison says,
Throughout all of this [Bush’s demagogic demonizing of Saddam], Powell enabled him and provided him with crucial support. In November 2002, Powell stated, “If there is going to be a war, it will be because of Saddam Hussein, not NATO, not the United Nations and not the United States of America.” That was not true, and it is hard to believe that Powell didn’t already know that when he made this statement. The presentation at the U.N. capped off a year’s worth of propaganda aimed at paving the way for the war.
Kaplan, who deeply admires Powell, insists that Powell’s infamous UN speech was all the result of deliberate deception on the part of Cheney and Rumsfeld, with a gracious assist from cowardly CIA director George Tenet, who, knowing that Dub-ya wanted the Iraq thing done, denied Powell access to the many CIA figures who could have set him straight. But, in fact, Powell was quite willing to play it cute himself, saying, for example, that Saddam “has the wherewithal to develop smallpox”, which could be said of the US as well. Most of all, I think—and neither Larison nor Akerman bother to mount what is assuredly my most favorite hobby horse (so I will)—as a military man Powell surely knew that the entire obsession with “weapons of mass destruction” was entirely bogus, because neither chemical nor biological weapons have any real function in modern combat. (And in fact never did)
I have written about this many times. I was a private in the army, not a four-star, but I knew this back in 1968, when I went through training. I received “chemical weapons training” three times and from the very first I realized one thing: every chemical weapons unit was a turkey farm. Any officer given a chemical weapons post knew his career was over. Any sergeant knew, if he cared, that his “job” was not to fuck up too badly and just to stumble through the rest of his hitch, grateful that he wasn’t being court-martialed.
And Powell participated in this entire charade, not even for his pension, but for his big office, for the opportunity to pretend he was still important, giving the remainder of his illustrious career all the grace of a slowly deflating Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon.
But it didn’t even end there. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton was being pilloried for her secret emails, Powell, though he had endorsed her, didn’t dare speak up, didn’t dare to aggressively defend her, which he could and should have done. His ease, and his rich friends, were too important to him. He finally spoke out loudly against Trump—in June 2020! Colin Powell, so often a day late and a dollar short.
Afterwords
With respect to Iraq at least, one can say, honestly, that Powell could not have stopped the invasion (though, of course, he didn’t have to promote it), except (possibly) by both resigning and publicly speaking out aggressively against it, which he surely lacked the courage to do. This (probably) would have all but wrecked the Bush administration, and one could argue that, given the crisis being experienced by the country at the time, wrecking a presidency in mid-term was not a good thing to do.
ADDENDUM
In my pretty passionate denunciation of poor old Colin for ignoring that “Gulf 1” spectacularly did not meet the requirements set forth in the Powell Doctrine for the “correct” use of military force, I, well, forgot the biggest failure of all, the spectacular failure to comply with two of the Doctrine’s most important strictures, to wit: “Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?” and “Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?”
Because the supposed exit strategy went out the window as soon as our troops’ boots hit the ground. The idea was, to crush not only Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait but also his spirit, and thus quiet the anxieties of those Nervous Nellies, the Saudis, the Sacred Keepers of the World’s Oil Supply and Maintainers of the Altar of Stable Oil Prices, at which U.S. Middle East Foreign Policy has worshipped for lo these many years. But Saddam’s response to his crushing was not quite as expected, for he used the hold on supreme power that the U.S. had deliberately granted to him to crush his enemies at home, appearing, to nervously blinking Saudi eyes at least, as potent as before. Let us keep your brave troops, begged the Saudis. And the U.S., unable, as always, to say no, said yes. And the rest was history, as I have summarized and repeated several times in the past, relying on Christian Alfonsi’s invaluable study Circle in the Sand as my primary source:
U.S. policy makers received frequent warnings that presence of a substantial number of U.S. troops [in Saudi Arabia] could lead to disaster. During the leadup to the first Iraqi War, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, warned the administration that “It remains our judgment that Saudi and Arab political realities preclude a U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land which appears to be open-ended or semi-permanent.” During the war itself, a report issued by a committee headed by Richard Clarke stated that “A permanent U.S. presence will provide a rationale for, and could become a target for, the terrorist threat that will outlive the war.” But the Saudi ruling class wanted us there, as did Israel and the Israel lobby here in the U.S.
1. Yes, I know that Bob knows “everyone” and I know no one, but that doesn’t matter.
2. Not my gag. Peter Finley Dunne, aka “Mr. Dooley”, said back in the day that Justice is blind—and deaf and dumb and with a wooden leg.
3. Double-dome libertarians Gary Becker and Milton Friedman also chipped in, “explaining” that, since racial segregation was economically inefficient, there was no need for legislation prohibiting it, which was unconstitutional anyway, violating the “sacred” rights of property and contract. Just ignore segregation, they said, and it would disappear on its own, something it somehow hadn’t done for, well, 350 years.
