National Review
Online
Monday, October
18, 2021
Colin Powell lived a great American
life.
Born in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants, he
graduated from City College, where he participated in ROTC, then served two
tours in Vietnam, before ascending the ladder to eventually occupy top
positions in the U.S. government.
Powell, the first African-American
chairman of the Joint Chiefs and secretary of State, was a widely admired
symbol of the American Dream, and rightly so.
A very capable man, he was also a
conventional thinker whose perennial denunciations of the Republican Party had
become toothless and predictable even before Donald Trump showed up on the
scene. Over the years, we had substantial differences with him on politics and
policy.
Powell came to prominence as Ronald
Reagan’s national-security adviser, a role Reagan had difficulty filling
throughout his tenure. Powell did the job well, and then George H. W. Bush made
him his chairman of the Joint Chiefs. At the height of his powers, Powell
brilliantly managed the first Persian Gulf War, becoming famous for his clear,
pungent briefings.
The war was the first real test of the
post-Vietnam U.S. military, and it passed with flying colors. Yet Powell and
his civilian bosses were too eager to end the war on a rapid timetable with a
memorably round number — 100 hours — and left a festering problem in Iraq that
would, with time, swallow the presidency of George H. W. Bush’s son and dent
Powell’s own reputation.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Powell
was a national hero, and his decision not to run for the Republican nomination
in 1996 is, as everyone says, one of the great “What if’s?” of recent American political history.
Powell became George W. Bush’s secretary
of State and made an outsized contribution to the dysfunction at the top of the
administration’s national-security apparatus. He was a classic case of a
secretary of State getting captured by his own building and waged a constant
war of leaks against his adversaries in the administration, especially at the
Department of Defense.
Powell’s presentation on the evidence of
Iraq’s WMD’s prior to the Iraq War became an enormous embarrassment. Yet the
fault was more with the overall state of the intelligence — accepted across
agencies of the U.S. government and by foreign spy organizations, as well —
rather than Powell’s handling of it per se.
The famous Powell doctrine, setting out a
series of tests before engaging in military conflict, can be too formulaic and
constraining, but there’s no doubt that the Bush administration should have
been more mindful of the good reasons for Colin Powell’s general hesitance
about using military force before it launched the Iraq War.
Powell’s disaffection with his own
Republican Party began in 2008, when he endorsed Barack Obama, and only grew
over time. He was never a conservative, but a man of the center-right who moved
left over time.
He won’t be remembered, though, for his
positions on politics, but for a long, consequential career of service to a
country that he loved and that benefited from his devotion. R.I.P.
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