Colin Powell has died

As to "company man" ... Watch "Mars Attacks!" for the best portrayal of Colin Powell to hit the big screen.

Did you see any other black men doing the same thing?

Nothing. They just had different interests: his to promote his career and feed the imperial machine, theirs to end war.

>If you’re not even 20, that outcome might not have been obvious. But if you served two tours in Vietnam and are in your 50s, you should know better

If you care about the country/justice/etc, which is a big if in politics.

The first had broad public support in both parties and in the public. ... over 90%. As well as support from NATO, the EU, and many other nations as it was an operation to get Osama Bin Laden after 9/11.

The invasion of Iraq was far more controversial and motivated by oil politics.

They are completely different animals.

> "His discussion on the war with Iraq is where I most disagreed with Mr. Safire. He spoke almost exclusively in terms of logistics and not potential realities. To him Iraq was a threat pure and simple and the United States had the obligation, the right, and the capability to neutralize that threat, with or without the UN. He offered troop estimates from potential allies in Turkey and the UK, and the explanations of the military superiority of the US as if anyone in the audience was wondering if the US had the means to militarily incapacitate Iraq."

And the concluding sentence:

> "Safire said quite effortlessly that Saddam is a threat that must be neutralized at all costs, but he doesn’t think the costs will be all that great. If he and Bush are wrong it will be one of the greatest political blunders in recent history."

Everyone knew that Iraq was a war of W's choosing and was mostly motivated by the influence of Cheney and Rumsfeld. The doves were uniformly against war as anything but a last recourse, and the idea of starting one on shaky pretenses was abhorrent to us. What we didn't know ahead of time was that the pretenses were even thinner than we imagined and there weren't in fact WMDs, which made the whole thing all the more farcical and tragic.

I think that affected everyone's expectations about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was cynical about our motivations and our ability to accomplish anything with the invasions in 2001 and 2003, and was opposed to anything more than punitive action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but still I did not foresee the scope of what happened. I thought there was no way an American administration could get suckered into the same kind of conflict, led on by the same chronic overpromising from generals. They would know that the generals would never tell the truth about what they could accomplish by military means. They would know a majority of the society would be bitterly polarized against us as foreign invaders. They would know the inherent difficulty of what they were trying to do. They would know they weren't being told the truth about the situation on the ground. They wouldn't make the mistake of accepting unrealistic definitions of victory.

That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on. Instead, we made all the same mistakes over again, and looking back we see the continuity of Vietnam and Afghanistan, with the Gulf War just an anomalous blip in between.

[0] https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix...

Rhetorical question?

WRT Iraq, it was public knowledge that:

a) Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, indeed Iraq and al Qaeda were idealogical opponents.

b) Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; cite Hans Blix, others.

c) Iraqi leader Hussein had completely capitulated, meaning GWB had effectively won without firing a single shot.

d) Bush Admin and their sources were lying and didn't care that every one knew they were lying.

WRT Afghanistan, I don't readily recall what intelligence failures were publicly known at the time. Complicity of Pakistan's ISI. Allowing bin Laden to escape. The tar pit of dealing with Taliban, the misc war lords of the Northern Alliance.

Many objected to Bush Admin's focus on Iraq at the expense of the Afghanistan effort.

Many more objected to Bush Admin's violation of the Powell Doctrine, in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many pointed out the advocates for invading Iraq, mostly the neo-cons (aka chickenhawks), simply wanted war, regime change, and so forth. They'd said as much for over a decade. They seized the crisis of 9/11 to enact their plans. It was all very audacious and unapologetic.

Nothing.

What they knew that Colin Powell also knew was that Colin Powell was lying. Many of the lies weer debunked, in near real time, by the major press (and/or UN weapons inspectors), not just showing that the claims were false but also the specific indications that the US government knew them to be false..?

Also when Rice was testifying that if Hussein had HEU that he was 9 months away from a nuclear device I knew she was lying without lying, because I'm probably 9 months away from a (crude) nuclear device if you give me enough HEU (and let me buy some chemicals to make explosives).

The yellowcake nonsense was also clearly nonsense in real-time, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 because Hussein would have put to death any Salafists he could find.

I also was old enough then to remember this guy explaining why invading Iraq was a bad idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7Ik_X1HU0

And fast-forward to today and Michael R. Gordon who put forward the argument in the NYT that Iraq was building a nuclear bomb (the "aluminum tubes") is the same journalist who wrote the sick Wuhan lab workers piece in the WSJ (which once again only quoted "intelligence sources say..." and was otherwise fact-free). When someone is getting you very, very angry at a foreign power you should question why (Democrats would do well to look at all the hype around Russia and all the nothing being done about the Trump administration by Biden).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mỹ_Lai_massacre#Media_coverage

Two major national news press outlets — The New York Times and The Washington Post, received some tips with partial information but did not act on them.

Ridenhour called Seymour Hersh on 22 October 1969. The freelance investigative journalist conducted an independent inquiry, and published to break the wall of silence that was surrounding the Mỹ Lai massacre. Hersh initially tried to sell the story to Life and Look magazines; both turned it down. Hersh went to the small, Washington-based Dispatch News Service, which sent it to fifty major American newspapers; thirty accepted it for publication.[157] New York Times reporter Henry Kamm investigated further and found several survivors of the Mỹ Lai massacre in Sou

If Powell is the one responsible, are you absolving Donald Rumsfeld and more importantly Dick Cheney of responsibility? How about the join houses of congress and the US press. Do they all get absolved of responsibility because Powell gave a speech at the UN?

The US was going to war and though he did not like it, Powell was tasked with speaking to the UN about it. Did he know some of what he said was not sustained by facts, or even that they were lies? Sure and he regretted it the rest of his days.

The important point is, Powell at the UN or not, the US was going to war. Laying all the deaths on him is completely scapegoating a fine man and thus excusing the true Neocon powerbrokers who are ultimately responsible.

No doubt that Colin Powell did the wrong thing when he lied to the UN, but let's not throw around the term "war criminal" to mean "someone who did the wrong thing."

History will not repeat itself because you didn't properly and fully disparage a person beneath the news of their passing in a little-known internet news forum.

or something like that.

But that doesn't mean we have to let our sense of morality hold nobody culpable, as if everyone is part of a firing squad and you can't prove who had the blank. Merely signing up for the firing squad shows that you intended to kill, and the responsibility for the death falls on all the people in the squad (as well as all the people who organized it and decided to put a particular prisoner in front of it, etc.), not none of them.

"The US" was only going to war in Iraq because a lot of people arranged things so that it could happen. It's probably true that if any one person decided not to participate, it would still have happened. But if enough people decided not to participate, it wouldn't. And we saw clearly in the last months of the previous presidency that one high-ranking individual can certainly make things a lot more difficult for a president who wants to wage war and that more generally "resistance inside the administration" can be at least partly effective.

I think if we're going to say that an illegal war happened, that people lost their lives because of it, and that it would have been good and moral to try to stop the war, we also need to say that it was bad and immoral to go along with making it happen.

It's true what they say - success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.

While this is true, you're not allowed to criticize the flawlessly angelic Intelligence Community on HN.

Holding up the CIA as a bastion of virtue whilst denouncing the public faces of our war crimes is the best way to maintain your karma here. When Tony Blair passes, be sure to dance on his grave too, because the GCHQ puppetmasters did absolutely nothing wrong.

It's always best for one's personal reputation to shoot the messenger, not the man behind the curtain.

Someone else could have been the messenger, and Powell could have also resigned in protest and become a whistleblower.

Instead he lied, deceived the public, and unequivocally supported the wars.

But in principle, since 1945, no one can evade personal responsibility for a clearly unlawful act by pointing to superior orders.

Powell had a hard choice, yet life often puts us in such situations. He should have resigned, in my view. If he did not, he shares in the responsibility for what was done.

[1] https://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/to-be-or-to-do/

Would that include President Obama?

Textbooks a century from now will include his name. It could have been in a positive light, but now his name will be forever tarnished.

It's a heck of a lot better than none. And sadly people still don't care to treat Covid seriously, and nowhere near high enough vaccination rates in most places - thus no herd protection yet.