There’s no inspiring American success story grander than that of Colin Powell, who died this week at 84.
Raised in the South Bronx by Jamaican parents, an admittedly indifferent C student at the City College of New York, he rose to become a four-star general in the United States Army, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, national security adviser and secretary of state of the nation to which his clerk father and seamstress mother immigrated.
Commissioned into the Army as a second lieutenant after joining the ROTC, he served two tours of duty in Vietnam, and was wounded by a punji stake there in 1963. His combat experiences forever colored his military philosophers about protecting American troops at all costs.
After his amazing rise and rise through the ranks and into government service for a succession of presidents, Powell made what he later admitted — over and over — was an enormous mistake, one that would forever mar the way history viewed him.
As secretary of state, post 9/11, he was sent by the administration of President George W. Bush to address an emergency session of the United Nations and make the case for an international invasion of Iraq because “there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.”
The research Powell had been given was faulty. But Powell’s oratorical skills worked, and the world unfortunately went along with the United States into an unjust war.
The speech and its awful aftermath were a “blot” on his career, he later said. “It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.”
Great people who find their way into positions of power for all the right reasons are also capable of great mistakes.
Let Colin Powell’s tragic mistake, and his acknowledgment of it, be a lesson to all about the dangers of capricious American military adventurism in coming decades. After the revelations of American torture in Iraq, Powell said: “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.”
And let the magnificent intelligence and character of Powell, that rare general with the guts to say when he was wrong, be an example to all future Americans.
— Tribune News Service
