I won't understand respect for someone who was reponsible for the deaths of 100s of thousands of people because he lied.
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.
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.
Intel agencies do have the problem that if they go off the rails, there's not many paths to reform outside of direct involvement. I also strongly suspect that they're doing some terrible and unnecessary things to this day (e.g. still ruining lives in a protracted battle with Marx's ghost) and need reform, but that's really the strongest claim I can make.
You’re joking, right? The CIA is shit on all the time. It’s a fucking joke just like most other state run agencies that are all self-interested and don’t actually look out for the public good.
The CIA is responsible for huge amounts of horrible shit across the entire world. Constantly instilling puppet dictators and destabilizing countries for generations now - all for the glory of US capitalism and imperialism.
Doesn’t mean Colin Powell is absolved either. Everyone involved is to blame. Even the voters.
It's true what they say - success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
But in principle, since 1945, no one can evade personal responsibility for a clearly unlawful act by pointing to superior orders.
Really though, this is a stupid comparison. People generally remember the Nuremberg trials in the context of the Holocaust -- genocide, slave labor, and all the horror that accompanied it. Colin Powell did nothing remotely close to any of that, and while there is plenty of criticism to throw at the US for the invasion of Iraq there was no genocide, no ethnic cleansing, no slave labor camps, and a dozen US soldiers were thrown in prison by the US for having tortured and humiliated prisoners under their command.
> Operating partly under the dictates of the old prize rules, the U-boat commander, Korvettenkapitän Werner Hartenstein, immediately commenced rescue operations. U-156 broadcast her position on open radio channels to all Allied powers nearby, and were joined by the crews of several other U-boats in the vicinity.
>[...] En route, the U-boat was spotted by a B-24 Liberator bomber of the US Army Air Forces. The aircrew, having reported the U-boat's location, intentions and the presence of survivors, were then ordered to attack the sub.
>[...] The commanders of the Kriegsmarine were quickly issued the Laconia Order by Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, which specifically forbade any such attempt and ushered in unrestricted submarine warfare for the remainder of the war.
>[...] During the later Nuremberg trials, a prosecutor attempted to cite the Laconia Order as proof of war crimes by Dönitz and his submariners. The ploy backfired and caused much embarrassment to the United States after the incident's full report had emerged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident
It's also specifically not about genocide vs non-genocide but about legal vs. illegal orders. Just because you represent the US of A you cannot lie to the whole world to start a war. I mean, you can as evidenced by Powell, but a lot of people will spit on your grave for that.
Suppose he fled the US for some neutral country, resigned his position, and made a public announcement that he knew that the case for war was fraudulent and that the international community had an obligation to stop the US. What would have happened?
Suppose he simply resigned to spend more time with his family the night before his speech to the UN.
Suppose he did not decide (as he did in real life) that he was going to support the president in waging war without the support of the UN, and he told the world as much.
Suppose he insisted on having more time to review the material himself before making the speech to the UN.
There were a number of times where he could have changed the course of history. Yes, it would have come at significant personal cost to himself and perhaps significant embarrassment of America on the world stage. If you're unwilling to do that for a raise, sure, that seems reasonable; if you're unwilling to do that to prevent tens of thousands of deaths, you are absolutely morally culpable for those deaths.
The invasion of Iraq on false premises was itself a war crime, and the killings of Iraqi soldiers was just as immoral as killing civilians. Quoting one of the rulings at Nuremberg: "War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
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.
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.